Quotes to inspire and reflect

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.

Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food and an immense quiet.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

A letter is a soliloquy, but a letter with a postscript is a conversation.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

Look out how you use proud words. When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.

What is traveling? Changing your place? By no means! Traveling is changing your opinions and your prejudices.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

It proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

We work to become, not to acquire.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing. It’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.

When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life or in the life of another.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

The worst part is not in making a mistake but in trying to justify it, instead of using it as a heaven-sent warning of our mindlessness or our ignorance.

Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man’s companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually to be fearing you will make one.

Give me the benefit of your convictions, if you have any; but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own.

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

Believe one who has tried it.

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

The person who has had a bull by the tail once has learned 60 or 70 times as much as a person who hasn’t.

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

Never give in—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—except to convictions of honor and good sense.

Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.