Quotes to inspire and reflect

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; And if I die no soul will pity me: And wherefore should they, since that I myself Find in myself no pity to myself?

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore, we must learn both arts.

Cowardly dogs bark loudest.

The best coffee in Europe is Vienna coffee, compared to which all other coffee is fluid poverty.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth; Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth! Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain! Once there was The People - it shall never be again!

Every woman knows all about everything.

Funny how the new things are the old things.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.

Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.

He who neglects to drink from the spring of experience is likely to die of thirst in the desert of ignorance.

Better shun the bait, then struggle in the snare.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.

Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Put yourself on view. This brings your talents to light.

Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.

The future depends on what we do in the present.

Unless you believe, you will not understand.

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

Where would this country be without this great land of ours?

I wanted to be bored to death, as good a way to go as any.

In charity there is no excess.

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.

Toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other.

Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.

As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.