Quotes to inspire and reflect

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.

Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober." G. K.

Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.

What a deformed thief this fashion is.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Be careful -- with quotations, you can damn anything.

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.

I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

May your service of love a beautiful thing; want nothing else, fear nothing else and let love be free to become what love truly is.

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections. For love which hath ends, will have an end; whereas that which is founded on true virtue, will always continue.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob. G. K.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to. W.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. H. L.

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.