Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

All wealth is the product of labor.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.

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

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

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

You conquer every hardness with your eyes, as you do likewise every light; so if it can happen that one can die of joy, now would be the time.

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

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake his neighbours up.

The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

Time heals what reason cannot.

Love is know the pain of too much tenderness.

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, but I know none, therefore am no beast.

What kind of people do they think we are, do they think we will be bowed by their tryanny?

For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence.

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.

No question is ever settled until it is settled right.

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?