Quotes to inspire and reflect

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.

It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

I like to have a man’s knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a man who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Thought is action in rehearsal.

If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Serving God is doing good to man. But praying is thought an easier service and is therefore more generally chosen.

The greatest prayer is patience.

Quarrels would not last long if the fault were on one side only.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s .

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time a tremendous whack.

A good indignation makes an excellent speech.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

We give advice by the bucket but take it by the grain.

The thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never any good to oneself.

People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.

We are never so generous as when giving advice.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

You don’t need to take a person’s advice to make him feel good—just ask for it.

Refusing to have an opinion is a way of having one, isn’t it?

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always valueless.

I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music and silence.

The vanity of being known to be entrusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

He who has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

Silence, along with modesty, is a great aid to conversation.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.