Quotes to inspire and reflect

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; and so it is with man’s mind.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.

Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.

An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions.

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

The metaphor is a shorter simile, or rather a kind of magical coat, by which the same idea assumes a thousand different appearances.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory around it, and darts a luster through a whole sentence.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Each man’s memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

Marriage is a great institution—but I’m not ready for an institution.

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word.

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.

If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

Love that is ignorant and hatred have almost the same ends.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at a time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

Animals are such agreeable friends— they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you have the feeling that a person sitting inside is making fun of you.

a request for money is the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

Love must be as much a light as a flame.

All love that has not friendship for its base, Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

Love . . . dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.

I never knew how much like heaven this world could be, when two people love and live for one another!