Quotes to inspire and reflect

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.

In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove;

 

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

O Love, O fire! once he drew

 

It is the little rift within the lute,

 

Well, my daddy left home when I was three, And didn’t leave much to Ma and me, Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now I don’t blame him because he run and hid, But the meanest thing he ever did was Before he left, he went and named me Sue.

 

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.

 

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; Tomorrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New Year; Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

 

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

She has always been there, my darling.

But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire.

Where we love is home—home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

A house that has a library in it has a soul.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, Bake me a cake as fast as you can; Pat it and prick it, and mark it with B, Put it in the oven for baby and me.

The family is the country of the heart.

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

 

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin—the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

Why were we crucified into sex?

 

We should render a service to a friend to bind him closer to us, and to an enemy in order to make a friend of him.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly ones.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how that can be? / I know not, but I feel the agony.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

It is the peculiarity of the bore that he is the last person to find himself out.

Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin

 

Hogmanay, like all festivals, being but a bank from which we can only draw what we put in.

 

Friendship is...the sort of love one can imagine between angels.

Friendship is not necessary, like philosophy, like art....

Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.

There is no friend like an old friend who has shared our morning days, no greeting like his welcome, no homage like his praise.

Measure your life in love.

 

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable. E. M.

The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination. J. R. R.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. J. R. R.

Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . ."

The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.

Than never to have loved at all.

Hope smiles on the threshold of the year to come, whispering that it will be happier.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.