Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

One can acquire everything in solitude except 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

There is no sin except stupidity.

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

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

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.

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

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

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

Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard.

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

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

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 every man’s loco spot.

Sex is an emotion in motion.

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

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

Sex is identical to comedy in that it involves timing.

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

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument.

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

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

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

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

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

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