Quotes to inspire and reflect

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence, my friends call it.

Hell has no benefits, only torture.

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.

A Dream is where a boy can swim in the deepest oceans and fly over the highest clouds. Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbledore 11429 There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping, For only the hand of God can contain your hearts.

Who is better, they who promote truth over happiness, or happiness over truth?

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

Are you insinuating that I am a purveyor of terminological inexactitudes?

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.

Well, the telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

Everything passes. Everything changes. Just do what you think you should do.

There are no dirty words, only dirty minds.

And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere possibility of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas-a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.

To sit back hoping that someday, someway, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last--but eat you he will.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. any truth is better than make-Believe!

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are!

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

Spring is the time of the year, when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.

Wine is bottled poetry.

Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you speak.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety

Necessity makes even the timid brave.

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites...

Too much rest is rust.

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of the World, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.