Quotes to inspire and reflect

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.

Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till somebody had told a story.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.

Fiction is the higher autobiography.

Fear has many eyes.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls.

Fear has a smell, as love does.

One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.

Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates for a secret doubt.

A family is but too often a commonwealth of malignants.

The Family is a petty despotism.

If a kingdom be . . . a great family, a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal.

I mean the attempt to prolong family connection unduly, and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man’s everyday wants.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.

As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.

Fame is a fickle food Upon a shifting plate.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

Fame is a pearl many dive for and only a few bring up.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

A man’s life is interesting primarily when he has failed—I well know. For it’s a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot-stove lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

Experience has two things to teach: the first, that we must correct a great deal; the second, that we must not correct too much.

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.

Expectation improperly indulged in must end in disappointment.