Quotes to inspire and reflect

When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for .success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. W.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it.

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

Manufacturing and commercial monopolies owe their origin not to a tendency imminent in a capitalist economy but to governmental interventionist policy directed against free trade and laissez faire.

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?

Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today.

To know when to be generous and when to be firm -- this is wisdom.

There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

To generalize is to be an idiot.

To philosophize is to doubt.

The service you do for others is the rent you pay for the time you spend on earth.

Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

The individual must not merely wait and criticize, he must defend the cause the best he can. The fate of the world will be such as the world deserves.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

War is based on deception.

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

The public is a ferocious beast -- one must either chain it up or flee from it.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

The first mistake in public business is the going into it.

I never know how much of what I say is true.

Getting caught is the mother of invention.

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well -- he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.

A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.