Quotes to inspire and reflect

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Great artists have no country.

What did my hands do before they held you?

A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

The tragedy of life is what dies in the hearts and souls of people while they live.

Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, none knew so well as I: For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

In a friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.

Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few.

I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

The greatest giver of alms is cowardice. F.

The extreme limit of wisdom-- that is what the public calls madness.

Passion governs, and she never governs wisely.

It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body.

As long as there are fools and rascals, there will be religions.

We must always have old memories and young hopes.

The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather that hostile.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

The question is not what you look at but what you see.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

We only do well the things we like doing.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought and could be.

When you learn, teach. When you get, give.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

And once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complexity of human life so pletifuly presents.

The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we are the grown-ups.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

Love goes out the door when money comes innuendo.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Lakes, rivers, streams...all are water and all travel to the same destination. So it is with religion.

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

God give me strength to face a fact though it slays me. Thomas H.

I dwell in possibilities.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian #3601 When one door of happiness closes, another one opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened to us. Helen Keller #3602I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.