Quotes to inspire and reflect

Failure is the true test of greatness.

It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

True greatness is free, kind, familiar, and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Greatness is a road that leads toward something unknown.

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously— the sweet, subtle satisfaction without the risk.

Gossip is the art-form of the man and woman in the street, and the proper subject for gossip, as for all art, is the behavior of mankind.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

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

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.

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.

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

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.