Quotes to inspire and reflect

How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?

He who doesn’t know anger doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know the immediate.

A sharp-tempered woman, or, for that matter, a man, / Is easier to deal with than the clever type / Who holds her tongue.

Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be irritated when in the wrong; but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is at bottom right.

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants [lacks] it hath a maimed mind.

Life is thorny; and youth is vain; / And to be wroth with one we love / Doth work like madness in the brain.

No man is angry that feels not himself hurt.

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

He did not believe in angels with soft faces and bright wings, but he believed in the dark spirits that hovered over the heads of lonely men.

Anger represents a certain power, when a great mind, prevented from executing its own generous desires, is moved by it.

It is not known precisely where angels dwell— whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors'.

Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition.

[His] mentality was one that had been remarked upon as being peculiarly American since the nation had been born—the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.

The American vice is explanation.

It is ironic that a nation that has never experienced a coup d'etat should be so obsessed with the idea of conspiracy.

We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege.

We [Americans] are the lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.

There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as “American.”

We [America] are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the belly laugh and the dozen other labels for the roll-’em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo.

The patriots are those who love America enough to see her as a model to mankind.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America’s exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Self-help and self-control are the essence of the American tradition.

From the very beginning our people have markedly combined practical capacity for affairs with power of devotion to an ideal. The lack of either quality would have rendered the other of small value.

We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.

The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships “getting things done” but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.

It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world—it’s the American way of looking at things.

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.

America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever

There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

“I’m glad I’m American,” she said. "Here in Italy 1 feel that everybody’s dead. Carthaginians and old Romans and Moorish pirates and medieval princes with poisoned rings.

The Yankee is one who, if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can’t make him let go.

I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happys

And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

If an American were condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

There is a mortal breed most full of futility. / In contempt of what is at hand, they strain into the future, / hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes.

This is the posture of fortune’s slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.