Quotes to inspire and reflect

The problem with intelligent design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet--a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school?s curriculum. George F.

Happiness is a state of activity.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

Philanthropic people lose all sense of Humanity, it is their distinguishing characteristic.

[Optimism is] the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.

From timber so crooked as that from which man is carved, nothing entirely straight can be made.

And then, the unspeakable purity and freshness of the air! There was just enough heat to enhance the value of the breeze, and just enough wind to keep the whole sea in motion, to make the waves come bounding to the shore, foaming and sparkling, as if wild with glee.

Oh! dear; I was so miserable! I am sure I must have been as white as my gown.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

A woman should never be trusted with money.

How much I love every thing that is decided and open!

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed.

Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.

If you marry you will regret it. If you do not marry you will regret it. If you marry or do not marry, you will regret it.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Live the wonderful life that is in you.

Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

From this day forward until the end of the world...we in it shall be remembered...we band of brothers.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.

Clearly he had his own strange way of judging things. I suspect he acquired it from the gospels.

I am going to Spain to fight an army without a general, and thence to the East to fight a general without an army.

That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

Strength is the outcome of need. H. G.

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity. H.

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

For there is no greater pain, than to remember in present grief, past happiness’s.

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a human struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.

Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

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.

To be possessed is an admirable reason for possessing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.