Quotes to inspire and reflect

If you are not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.

Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.

Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of inventions.

Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war. The cheers of the weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to count. Doom marches on.

Sometimes it takes courage to give into temptation.

I am only one; but still I am one. I may not be able to do everything, but still I can do something.

Nietzche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. G.K.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it it his head that splits. G.K.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. G.K.

Time is: Too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear.

In the cage there is food, not much, but there is food-outside are only great stretches of freedom.

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

Attempt easy tasks as if they were difficult, and difficult as if they were easy; in the one case that confidence may not fall asleep, in the other that it may not be dismayed.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

Let tears flow of their own accord: their flowing is not inconsistent with inward peace and harmony.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. P. G.

Non-violence does not signify that man must not fight against the enemy, and by enemy is meant the evil which men do, not the human beings themselves.

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.