Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquences sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

One’s own escape from troubles makes one glad; / but bringing friends to trouble is hard grief.

It is a painful thing / To look at your own trouble and know / That you yourself and no one else has made it.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.

The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can’t cure, / Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor.

The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.

The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willingly avoids the sight of distress.

Greater dooms win greater destinies.

If a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Disaster appears, to crush / one man now, but afterward another.

Ignorance of one’s misfortunes is clear gain.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

The memory of man is as old as misfortune.

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

He deposes Doom / Who hath suffered him—.

Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.

Public calamity is a mighty leveller.

Welcome each rebuff/That turns earth’s smoothness rough, / Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

When working on a project, if you put away a tool that you’re certain you’re finished with, you will need it instantly.

The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.

Misfortune / wandering the same track lights now upon one / and now upon another.

A high heart ought to bear calamities and not flee them, since in bearing them appears the grandeur of the mind and in fleeing them the cowardice of the heart.

If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

He that has one eye is a prince among those that have none.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them.

Every advantage has its tax.

The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.

Admiration involves a glorious obliquity of vision.

Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy; but good administration can never save bad policy.

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that’s printed about him.

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.

By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

Let me say to you now that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

Every one has time if he likes. Business runs after nobody: people cling to it of their own free will and think that to be busy is a proof of happiness.

Better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.