Quotes to inspire and reflect

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything.

My mother said to me, if you go into the military, you will become a general. If you go into the clergy, you will become Pope. Instead, I became an artist, and I am Piccaso.

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

To be possessed is an admirable reason for possessing.

If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

It will be hard to discover a better [method of education] than that which the experience of so many ages has already discovered, and this may be summed up as consisting in gymnastics for the body, and _music_ for the soul... For this reason is a musical education so essential; since it causes Rhythm and Harmony to penetrate most intimately into the soul, taking the strongest hold upon it, filling it with _beauty_ and making the man _beautiful-minded_.

He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.

None are so busy as the fool and knave.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

No man resolved to make the most of himself has time to waste on personal contention.

THE DISAPPOINTED MAN SPEAKS.--I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the APES of their ideal.

How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

We all have thoughts that would shame the devil.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

To conceal ignorance is to increase it. An honest confession of it, however, gives ground for the hope that it will diminish some day or the other.

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

He was guilty of nothing, except that he earned his own fortune and never forgot that it was his.

I fixed my eyes on the larget cloud, as if, when it passed out of my sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

Courage may be taught as a child is taught to speak.

War can only be abolished by war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

...people are by nature fickle, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them persuaded.

The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

My wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way.

These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

Tell me....And I Forget,
Teach me.....And I Learn,
Involve Me.....And I Remember.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against being read.

It is said that the camera cannot lie, but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see.

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.

The ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

If someone tells you who they are, believe them.

The chief proof of mans greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

Virtue they will but abuse, and taunt her with bitter revilling.

I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.

Erase fancy; curb impulse; quench desire; let sovereign reason have the mastery.

It is a sin to persue pleasure as a good and to avoid pain as a evil.

The sinners sins against himself; the wrongdoer wrongs himself, becoming the worse by his own action.

Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. H. P.

Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.

Things are never as bad as they seem.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive.

One ought to seek out virtue for its own sake, without being influenced by fear or hope, or by any external influence. Moreover, that in that does happiness consist.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

All government -- indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act -- is founded on compromise and barter.

Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.

Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.