Quotes to inspire and reflect

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one.

Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.

How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

A man's private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always.

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth.

A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage that we move on to better things.