Quotes to inspire and reflect

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

We are all exceptional cases.... Each man insists on being innocent, even if it means accusing the whole human race, and heaven.

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will.

Might, could, would—they are contemptible auxiliaries.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.

Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

But pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

Childhood has no forebodings, but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

There’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himself, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two ’pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

We get into the habit of living before, acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

The man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to he a good-humored person, though liable to be tedious at times.

Though 1 know he loves me, / Tonight my heart is sad; / His kiss was not so wonderful / As all the dreams I had.

I hold it true, what’re befall feel it, when I sorrow most ‘is better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

I love you. I used to pity your sorrow. But now, were you sorrowless, without fear or any lack, still i would love you. J. R. R.

 

Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.

'Honour thy father and thy mother' stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness.

My fair one, let us swear an eternal friendship.

Da mi basia mille.

 

Love’s pleasure lasts but a moment;

 

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Nota nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down onor to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

 

What a woman says to an eager lover, / write it on running water, write it on air.

Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy.

 

The truly erotic sensibility, in evoking the image of woman, never omits to clothe it. The robing and disrobing: that is the true traffic of love.

There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.

It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son’s age.

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it, and am in agony.

Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.

My grandkids say, 'Reality Bites.' O.K., but it also challenges and rewards...I believe our best days are yet to come.

His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. J. R. R.

 

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Golf is like a love affair. If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.