Quotes to inspire and reflect

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.

Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another to hear.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.

Our life is frittered away by detail …

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.

The three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

A man you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

Books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a prime mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.

It’s a funny old world.

Tantum ergo sacramentum