Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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.

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

The last Christian died on the cross.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Great artists have no country.

What did my hands do before they held you?

I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

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

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

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

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

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.

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.

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

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.

The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.

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

The greatest giver of alms is cowardice. F.

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.

Passion governs, and she never governs wisely.

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

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

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

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.

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

We must always have old memories and young hopes.

We only do well the things we like doing.

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

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