Quotes to inspire and reflect

I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,

I sing the body electric.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Mrs Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

In all directions stretched the great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I used to be Snow White … but I drifted.

It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men.

‘Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!’

Beulah, peel me a grape.

I always say, keep a diary and some day it’ll keep you.

Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry.

I look upon all the world as my parish.

I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who shall convert me?

I design plain truth for plain people.

Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness.

Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything.

The Gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.

God damn you all: I told you so.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

The shape of things to come.

The war that will end war.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

This is the biggest electric train a boy ever had!

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.

Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,

We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

’Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden; the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.

We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ … ‘Yes,’ said the Managing Editor. ‘That must be good style.’

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.

Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.