Quotes to inspire and reflect

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.

If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Ten thousand bad traits cannot make a single good one any the less good.

He who cannot forgive others destroys the bridge over which he himself must pass.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

He best can pity who has felt the woe.

Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

You can’t test courage cautiously.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage.

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

Courage is often lack of insight, whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.

Facing it—always facing it—that’s the way to get through. Face it!

Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.

We may be willing to tell a story twice but we are never willing to hear it more than once.

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

Whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person, its importance not being fully recognized for some time.

Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again.

If you’re strong enough, there are no precedents.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.

The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody—it saves so much trouble.

The time is always right to do what is right.

The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.

Cheerfulness, like spring, opens all the blossoms of the inward man.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape Nuts on principle.

Say not you know a man entirely till you have divided an inheritance with him.

He who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.

Modesty is to merit what shade is to figures in a picture; it gives it strength and makes it stand out.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable.

The truth about a man is, first of all, what it is that he keeps hidden.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.