Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If someone tells you who they are, believe them.

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

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.

For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds,
And though a late, a sure reward succeeds.

When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.

The most dangerous folly of old people who were once attractive is to forget that they are not so any longer.

The man whom no one pleases is much more unhappy than the man who pleases no one.

The sort of liveliness which increases with age is not far distant from madness.

There are very few women in society whose virtue outlasts their beauty.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

The goal of all life is death.

I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme, I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves.

Rules too soft are seldomly followed; rules too harsh are seldomly executed.

Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.

This world is the will to power - and nothing besides!