Quotes to inspire and reflect

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

English is the easiest language to speak badly.

The dark today leads into light tomorrow;
There is no endless joy,
...and yet no endless sorrow.

Over one mind and over ones body the individual is sovereign.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the other.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

A special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children and the United States of America.

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.

Thinking evil is making evil.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

The President can bomb anybody he likes.

Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction.

I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.

The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.

Everyone has a right to his own course of action.

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were. W. H.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

You know what I say to people when I hear they?re writing an anti-war book?? I say, "why don?t you write an anti-glacier book instead?"
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

How to make God laugh: Tell him your future plans.

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

If people really want to go, and really try all their lives, I think they will get in; for I don?t believe there are any locks on that door, or any guards at the gate. I always imagine it is as it is in the picture, where the shining ones stretch out their hands to welcome poor Christian as he comes up from the river.

For men who had easily endured hardship, danger and difficult uncertainty, leisure and riches, though in some ways desirable, proved burdensome and a source of grief.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

You will make all kinds of mistakes but as long as you are generous and true and fierce you cannot hurt the world, or even seriously distress her.

The good times of today are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

All wealth is the product of labor.

Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.

Humans are driven by a perpetual and restless desire of power.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.

The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.

An artist does not fake reality--he *stylizes* it.

If men want to oppose war, it is *statism* that they must oppose.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

So as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; becouse the lion is defenceless against traps and the fox is defenceless against wolves. Therefore one must be a fox in order to recognise traps and lion to frighten off wolves.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

You only give me what you have left over, and you want things from me that I do not have.