Quotes to inspire and reflect

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth.

Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion.

Wherever the truth is injured, defend it.

Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.

Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn’t any.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.

Borrow trouble for yourself, if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbors.

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

To lose your prejudices you must travel.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.

The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time.

Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.

Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.

Time is the reef upon which all of our frail mystic ships are wrecked.

Associate reverently and as much as you can with your loftiest thoughts.

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don’t bite everybody.

The revelation of Thought takes men out of servitude into Freedom.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “ This is the real me!”

What’s a man’s first duty? The answer’s brief: to be himself.

Thinking is the endeavor to capture reality by the means of ideas.

When the mind is thinking, is it simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

“Every man has his price.” This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.

Integrity which has been attacked by no temptation can at best be considered but as gold not yet brought to the test, of which therefore the true value cannot be assigned.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.

Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target . . . others cannot even see.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.

Talent is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

The discovery of truth by slow, progressive meditation is talent. Intuition of the truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.