Quotes to inspire and reflect

[On recognizing China] But if you recognize anyone it does not mean you like them. For instance, we all recognize the right honorable gentleman the member for Ebbw Vale.

It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty.

If heaven is going to be full of people like Hardie, well, the Almighty can have them to himself.

There but for the grace of God goes God.

[He] looks at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.

I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Your motivation? Your motivation is your pay packet on Friday. Now get on with it.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.

no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

God created sex. Priests created marriage.

You ask, What is our policy? I will say; "It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy." You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat.

The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might; to eat with apple tart.

Truth, springs from argument amongst friends.

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.

Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a lovelier one of their own

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling

Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes!

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read. G.K.

Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturbed them.

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it. Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

He who will not economize will have to agonize.

That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt. But although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.

Do not commit your poems to pages alone, sing them I pray you.

The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. H.P.

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.