Quotes to inspire and reflect

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

An idea is a light turned on in a man’s soul.

One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

An idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer’s mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.

For neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks Invisible, except to God alone.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash— the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights.

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.

Humor is hope’s companion in arms. It is not brash, it is not cheap, it is not heartless. Among other things, I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit.

Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

Humor is but another weapon against the universe.

Among all kinds of writing, there is none in which authors are more apt to miscarry than in works of humor, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

A noble aim, Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed, In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed.

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

Be winged arrows, aiming at fulfillment and goal, even though you will tire without having reached the mark.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

An ignorance of means may minister To greatness, but an ignorance of aims Makes it impossible to be great at all.

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.

Humility is often only a feigned submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones. You desire to erect a very high building? Think first of the foundation of humility.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!

A great Hope fell You heard no noise The Ruin was within.

To be a hero, one must give an order to oneself.

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach.

Whoe’er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes.

Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

Calculation never made a hero.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.