Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.

Earth laughs in flowers.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Fear has many eyes.

Fear has a smell, as love does.

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

Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.