Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.

This poem will never reach its destination.

Decency...must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them

It takes a woman twenty years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

A big book is a big bore.

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Our truest life is when we are in our dreams awake.

I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

The only "ism" Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to the other.

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ

The worshiper is the father of the gods

Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know He is. Jean Anouilh #0766 We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

Children are never too tender to be whipped. Like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them, the more tender they become. Edgar Allan Poe #0754Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.

Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.

The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

Once the people begin to reason, all is lost.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.

MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.