Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

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.

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

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong. G. K.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece. G. K.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

When I say I believe in a square deal i do not mean ... to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.

[He was] a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe. Thomas H.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood

My tongue will tell the anger of mine heart, Or else my heart, concealing it, will break.

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute.