Quotes to inspire and reflect

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

A little tumult , now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an adventure of any lively description.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Cowards die many times before their deaths The valiant never taste of death but once.

Cowardice is the unpardonable sin in a man.

Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.

It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice.

Coward, n . One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.

Courage cannot be counterfeited. It is one virtue that escapes hypocrisy.

It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

Courage has need of reason, but it is not reason’s child; it springs from deeper strata.

The only proper intoxication is conversation.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

or the qualifications for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go.

Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine— it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

This was really a compliment to be pleased with— a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed . . . dairy-maid instead of the grease fit only for cartwheels which one is dosed with by the pound.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.

Compliments cost nothing, yet many pay dear for them.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

There is no pleasure to me without communication; there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind but I grieve that I have no one to tell it to.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

Civilization: if it is not in man’s heart—well, then, it is nowhere.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.