Quotes to inspire and reflect

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing buy rational actions.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

Love is our response to our highest values. Love is self-enjoyment. The noblest love is born out of admiration of another’s values.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it.

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud.

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences

America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice; but adversity doth best discover virtue.

Sleep, those little slices of death, how I loathe them.

Human excellence means nothing unless it works with the consent of God.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Have no fear of perfection -- you will never reach it.

The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental presence but an idea.

Strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure. F.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

I have found power in the mysteries of thought.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Friends are born, not made.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

She is a friend of my mind... The pieces I am, she gathers them and give them back to me in all the right order.

My friend is one... who take me for what I am.

My friends are my estate.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

In summer, the song sings itself.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious.

Hope is only the love of life.

Hope is necessary in every condition.

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.

The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said.

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.

We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.