Quotes to inspire and reflect

Fixed ideas are like a cramp in the foot - the best remedy against it is to tread on it.

The perfect man of action, is the suicide.

Honor and shame from no condition rise.
Act well your part: there all the honor lies.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Keep thy religion to thyself.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.

Spend and be spent.

Have love for everyone, no one is other than you.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business.

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge.

Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.

Thou art a Man, God is no more.
Thy own humanity learn to adore.

Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortune; of one entering instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself.

When you give up drinking, you have to deal with that wonderful personality that started you drinking in the first place.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.

To laugh is to live profoundly.

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

We must not just be in the world and above the world, but also of the world. To love it for what it is... is the only task. Avoid it and you are lost. Loose yourself in it, and you are free.

Honesty is being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.

A good life is a series of joyful meetings and joyful moments.

The only devils in this world are those running around in our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.

There are times of pure joy when you wish all human life well.

We have not seen great things done in our time except by those who have been considered mean; the rest have failed.

Is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.

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.

Thinking evil is making evil.

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

The President can bomb anybody he likes.

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

Everyone has a right to his own course of action.