Quotes to inspire and reflect

Nothing arouses ambition so much in the heart as the trumpet-clang of another’s fame.

Ambition makes more trusty slaves than need.

Who never climbed high never fell low.

The true way is the middle one, halfway between deserving a place and pushing oneself into it.

What’s my turn today may be thine tomorrow.

A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.

If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

For an impenetrable shield, stand inside yourself.

Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.

The main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

By keeping men off, you keep them on.

Retirement accords with the tone of my mind: / 1 will not descend to a world I despise.

As this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground.

Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.

I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.

Everything intercepts us from ourselves.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Men ... are not agreed about any one thing, not even that heaven is over our heads.

Nobody agrees with anybody else anyhow, but adults conceal / it and infants show it.

Attack is the reaction. I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

At worst, is not this an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?

The last I heard of the young man in question, he was trying to eke out a miserable existence as a book agent while he was looking about for a position somewhere with the Government as a janitor or for some other equally humble occupation.

Afterthought makes the first resolve a liar.

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.

Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.

It is a great bond to dislike the same things.

Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.

One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

The affections cannot keep their youth any more than men.

Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

The eye is the painter and the ear the singer.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.

It can be no dishonor / to learn from others when they speak good sense.

Friendly counsel cuts off many foes.

“If a lady comes up to you and tells you that your dear mama is lying in a faint on the pavement round the corner, don’t you believe her, don’t have anything to do with her, do not go with her into the cab. It is the White Slave Traffic.”

You will always find some Eskimos ready to instruct the Congolese on how to cope with heat waves.

We are so happy to advise.others that occasionally we even do it in their interest.

It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.

We are all wise for other people, none for himself.

Advice, n. The smallest current coin.

Who cannot give good counsel? ’Tis cheap, it costs them nothing.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

The light that a man receiveth by counsel from another is drier and purer than that which cometh from his own understanding and judgment, which is ever infused and drenched in his affections and customs.