Quotes to inspire and reflect

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.

Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.

Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.

We make our fortunes and call them fate.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

Those who become enamored of practices without science are like sailors who go aboard ship without a rudder and compass, for they are never certain where they will land.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind. F.

A democracy is two wolves and a small lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Freedom under a constitutional republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful...

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

It is time, it is high time... Yes, but to do what?

Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present. Thus it is that foresight, the greatest blessing humanity has been given, is transformed into a curse.

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.

Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming at something else, they find happiness by the way.

It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset, I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

Let us not forget that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. ... I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insects as well as for the stars, Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.

Did you know that every two hours the nations of this world spend as much on armaments as they spend on the children of this world every year?

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, before we too into the dust descend.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.

It is mathematics that offers the exact natural sciences a certain measure of security which, without mathematics, they could not attain.

Marriage is the golden ring in a chain, whose beginning is a glance and whose ending is eternity.

In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded heaven.

Ultimately nature and events are largely what our imaginations make them out to be.

I exist as I am, that is enough.

Death smiles at us all, but all a man can do is smile back.

Oh! love!... That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.

Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.

You have delighted us long enough.

In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry.

We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of a man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies. P. G.

O generations of men, how I count you as equal with those who live not at all!

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read. G. K.

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious. P. G.