Quotes to inspire and reflect

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

Those undeserved joys which come uncalled and make us more pleased than grateful are they that sing.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one’s powers towards some great end.

Jealousy is always born with love but does not always die with it.

When large numbers of people share their joy in common, the happiness of each is greater because each adds fuel to the other’s flame.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.

Jazz is the music of the body.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

Like the PC, the Internet is a tidal wave. It will wash over the computer industry and many others, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.

There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.

Ambition is the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field. It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.

Too great haste in paying off an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.

Of all crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude, especially when it is committed against parents.

Most people return small favors, acknowledge middling ones, and repay great ones with ingratitude.

Our gratitude to most benefactors is the same as our feeling for dentists who have pulled our teeth. We acknowledge the good they have done and the evil from which they have delivered us, but we remember the pain they occasioned and do not love them very much.

Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man.

What a miserable thing life is: you’re living in clover, only the clover isn’t good enough.

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ?

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

I took the road less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

But time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly, like a snake.

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.