Quotes to inspire and reflect

J’aime la majesté des souffrances humaines .

[ Of Ronald Reagan :] A triumph of the embalmer’s art.

I’m all for bringing back the birch, but onlybetween consenting adults.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words are used to disguise, notto illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

[ Of Richard Nixon :] He turned being a BigLoser into a perfect triumph by managing to lose the presidency in a way bigger and more original than anyone else had ever lost it before.

He will lie even when it is inconvenient, the sign of the true artist.

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenthsof the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of asupernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion.

Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui le cou .

Science, my lad, has been built upon manyerrors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

De la musique avant toute chose .

Et tout le reste est littérature .

Except for God, the King’s our only lord and master.

Les sanglots longs

At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?

Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement.

Un poème n’est jamais achevé—c’est toujours un accident qui le termine .

L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était .

To say that war is madness is like sayingthat sex is madness: true enough, from thestandpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles .

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

Life is doubt,

Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.

I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.

A lawyer one day spoke to him [Mark Twain] with his hands in his pockets. “Is it not a curious sight to see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets?” remarked the humorist in his quiet drawl.

A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

[ To his wife Olivia, who had repeated his swearing :] You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has leftentirely out of it the supremest of all hisdelights, the one ecstasy that stands first andforemost in the heart of every individual ofhis race—and of ours—sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in aroasting desert should be told by a rescuer hemight choose and have all longed for thingsbut one, and he should elect to leave outwater!

[ On the Bible :] It is full of interest. It hasnoble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.

News is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form . . . history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.

The language [German] which enables aman to travel all day in one sentence withoutchanging cars.

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was tautology.

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

Let me make the superstitions of a nationand I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’tstraight.

He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.

[ Quoting an “American joke” :] In Boston theyask, How much does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Whowere his parents?

Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn’t see him do it.