Quotes to inspire and reflect

Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Life is not dated merely by years. Events are sometimes the best calendars.

You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.

Butterflies count not months but moments, and yet have time enough.

I love best to have each thing in its season, doing without it at all other times.

Time marks us while we are marking time.

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

Of course, there must be subtleties. Just make sure you make them obvious.

Man creates culture and through culture creates himself.

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

I created nothing; I invented nothing; I imagined nothing; I perverted nothing; I simply discovered drama in real life.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

What art offers is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Those move easiest who have learned to dance.

God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing.

He who sings frightens away his ills.

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Where words fail, music speaks.

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

If you would know what nobody knows, read what everybody reads, just one year afterward.