Quotes to inspire and reflect

The great art of giving consists in this: the gift should cost very little and yet be greatly coveted, so that it may be the more highly appreciated.

Purchase not friends by gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love.

Life itself is a quotation.

It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.

He who confers a favor should at once forget it, if he is not to show a sordid ungenerous spirit. To remind a man of a kindness conferred and to talk of it, is little different from reproach.

Americans are overreaches; overreaching is the most admirable of the many American excesses. George F.

You may delay, but time will not.

Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.

True luck consists not in holding the best of the cards at the table; luckiest is he who knows just when to rise and go home.

It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterward.

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril.

My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the Universe.

When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.

Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.

I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?

If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?

When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?

Why is the man (or woman) who invests all your money called a broker?

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

The fact was I had the vision... I think everyone has... what we lack is the method.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H. G.

There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

The last Christian died on the cross.

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds; and I very rarely change it.

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance.

We should manage our fortunes as we do our health - enjoy it when good, be patient when it is bad, and never apply violent remedies except in an extreme necessity.

The most exhausting thing you can do is to be inauthentic.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Human speech is a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. H. P.

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.