Quotes to inspire and reflect

You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

I believe we should all behave quite differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time.

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.

All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français. What is not clear is not French.

Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing away.

Here is a sort of river of things passing into being, and time is a violent torrent; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

The future is called “perhaps”, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life.

Talent is formed in quiet retreat, character in the headlong rush of life.

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.

Our actions determine our dispositions.

Sport has the power to change the world, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.

Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.

Students accept astonishing things happening in human genetics without turning a hair but worry about GM soya beans.

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a recreation of her.

In questions of science, the writerity of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe — responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.

Foolish fanatics … the men who form the lunatic fringe in all reform movements.

Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate writerity, and don’t interfere.

In every party there is one person who, by his all-too-devout enunciation of party principles, provokes the other members to defect.

Tories, in short, are atrophied Englishmen, lacking certain moral and intellectual reflexes. They are recognisable, homely — even, on occasions, endearing — but liable to turn nasty at short notice.

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.

That accursed power which stands on privilege

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? I have never seen a thing so clear. His lids are like the lilac flower And soft as a moth, his breath. I shall not let go. There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Art is not essential where nature is sufficient.

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

Peace is always beautiful.

The earth is what we all have in common.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.

Disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man.

We never knows wot’s hidden in each other’s hearts; and if we had glass winders there, we’d need keep the shutters up, some on us, I do assure you!

Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people’s faces. A polite form of self-torture, the concert.