Quotes to inspire and reflect

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Believe me, every heart has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

There is no sin except stupidity.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

One leak will sink a ship: and one sin will destroy a sinner.

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.

To sin by silence when we should protest, Makes cowards of men.

Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

There is an eloquent silence: it serves sometimes to approve, sometimes to condemn.

Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

The serious artist . . . is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He’s obsessed by his material; it’s like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work . . . as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner . . . he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night.

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

Sex is an emotion in motion.

Can flowers but droop in absence of the sun, Which waked their sweets?

Sex is every man’s loco spot.

It is true I swim in a perpetual sea of sex but the actual excursions are fairly limited.

Sex is identical to comedy in that it involves timing.

I was wondering today what the religion of the country is— and all I could come up with was sex.

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means.

For flavor, Instant Sex will never supersede the stuff you had to peel and cook.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.

Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one’s self.