Quotes to inspire and reflect

One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.

By losing your goal—you have lost your way, too!

It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

What is genius—but the power of expressing a new individuality?

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

That’s what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

The future is a convenient place for dreams.

Gardening is not a rational act.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence?

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself.

When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.

Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover.

A learned fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool.

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

To be intimate with a foolish friend is like going to bed to a razor.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

Folly pursues us throughout our lives, and the man whom we call wise is he whose follies are proportionate to his age and to his fortune.

If we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine.

Profit from folly rather than participate in it.

The folly of one man is the fortune of another; for no man prospers so suddenly as by others’ errors.

The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

Earth laughs in flowers.

The flower has no weekday self, dressed as it always is in Sunday clothes.

Flattery is counterfeit money which, but for vanity, would have no circulation.

The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.