Quotes to inspire and reflect

Never ruin an apology with an excuse

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

When a man tells you he got rich by hard work, ask him whose.

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Only the educated are free

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Well begun is half done.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

The most beautiful words of love are told in silence for a look.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Can one be a saint without God? That’s the problem, in fact the only problem, I’m up against today.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

We are all exceptional cases.... Each man insists on being innocent, even if it means accusing the whole human race, and heaven.

There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.

At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive.

We get into the habit of living before, acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.

[ Gollum speaking of the Ring :] Where iss it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!

 

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Nota nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down onor to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

 

[ Remark after he was defeated in the presidentialelection :] A funny thing happened to me on theway to the White House.

 

The Oklahoma Ligno and Lithograph Co Weeps at a nude by Michael Angelo.

 

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Charles Babbage’s calculating machine] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

 

Love’s pleasure lasts but a moment;

 

Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy.

 

The wit we wish we had spoils the wit we have.

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

The truly erotic sensibility, in evoking the image of woman, never omits to clothe it. The robing and disrobing: that is the true traffic of love.

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin—the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

What is an obstacle in our loving men is the love they have for themselves, which is touchy, exclusive, inordinate, tragic. We could never love them as much as that.

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.