Quotes to inspire and reflect

If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture...Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities!

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the busiest life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.

Go not for every grief to the physician, nor for every quarrel to the lawyer, nor for every thirst to the pot.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.

There exist only three being’s worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.

To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion. G. K.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.

I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents.

If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater, suggest that he wear a tail.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.

Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. Paul Valery #7047 A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.

There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.