Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
17
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
13
Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.
16
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
19
The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling; to the former, infinite.
16
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
18
We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.
15
If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.
17
Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us.
15
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
12
The love of fairplay is a spectator's virtue, not a principal's.
10
Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.
12
Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.
10
Economy is the art of making the most of life.
10
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
11
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
10
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
15
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
12
No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may associate them.
13
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
11
In a slave state, the slaves rule: in Mayfair, the tradesman rules.
11
If you beat children for pleasure, avow your object frankly, and play the game according to the rules, as a foxhunter does; and you will do comparatively little harm. No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens, or that he suffers more acutely than the fox at the death. Remember that even in childbeating there is the sportsman's way and the cad's way.
14
Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
14
Domestic servants, by making spoiled children of their masters, are forced to intimidate them in order to be able to live with them.
16
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
13
A man enjoys what he uses, not what his servants use.
15
Masters and servants are both tyrannical; but the masters are the more dependent of the two.
19
The perfect servant, when his master makes humane advances to him, feels that his existence is threatened, and hastens to change his place.
15
The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust.
12
When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.
15
Your word can never be as good as your bond, because your memory can never be as trustworthy as your honor.
12
You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world.
16
Great men refuse titles because they are jealous of them.
13
There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
15
It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.
13
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
16
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
11
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
14
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
14
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
18
The assassin Czolgosz made President McKinley a hero by assassinating him. The United States of America made Czolgosz a hero by the same process.
11
Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
13
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
15
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
12
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
12
All scoundrelism is summed up in the phrase "Que Messieurs les Assassins commencent!"
15
Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal.
18
The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is Purity.
15