Quotes to inspire and reflect

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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

To generalize is to be an idiot.

To philosophize is to doubt.

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.

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.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.

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

War is based on deception.

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.

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

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

Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Getting caught is the mother of invention.

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

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

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.

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.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.

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

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock, should find the time in my face.

I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, ...let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death.

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.