Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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

The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another human being.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

But childhood, prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life— is the source from which self-respect springs.

There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

We own a dog—he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat—he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there.

If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you. If a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

Some little token of esteem Is needed, like a dish of cream.

The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority. Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshiped as gods.

I love in the cat that independent and almost ungrateful temper which prevents him from attaching himself to anyone

The cat purrs itself to sleep, being the only creature that sings its own lullaby.

Nobody knows what the cause is, Though some pretend they do; It’s like some hidden assassin Waiting to strike at you.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

There is only one valid definition of business: to create a customer.

Drive thy Business, or it will drive thee.

The brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

It is good to rub and polish our brains against that of others.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the highest flights of their art.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.

I am never bored anywhere; being bored is an insult to oneself.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.

as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The book is the most efficient technological instrument for learning that has ever been devised by the human mind.

The spirituals and the blues were not created out of sweet deceit. Spirituals and blues contain sublimated bitterness and humility, pathos and bewilderment.

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.