Quotes to inspire and reflect

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

The Hollywood tradition I like best is called "sucking up to the stars.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.

The family is a court of justice which never shuts down for night or day.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.

All children are essentially criminal.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and (there is) no cause to value one above the other." H.P.

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

The English think incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? Ursula K.

A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

I knew her before she was a virgin.

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.

Bore: a man who is never unintentionally rude.

People are far more sincere and good-humored at speeding their parting guests than on meeting them.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

He was a wise man who invented God.

Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to or not.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize." George Bernard Shaw #0597 To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby." W.

(Of Jesus): ""A parish demogogue.

Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any penalties.

The school of hard knocks is an accelerated curriculum.

What a time! What a civilization!

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.

Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.