Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.

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.

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.

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.

Humor is but another weapon against the universe.

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.

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.

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

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

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

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

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

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

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Calculation never made a hero.

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

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

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.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.