Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

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

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

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.

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

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

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 fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.