Quotes to inspire and reflect

Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old.

Few are qualified to shine in company; but it is in most men’s power to be agreeable.

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly, that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants, by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.

She wears her clothes, as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.

We are so fond of one another, because our ailments are the same.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

He replied that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not . (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.

I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

It is the folly of too many, to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

Last cigarette!!

I s’pect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily.

I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.

I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.

This be the verse you grave for me:

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

Go, little book, and wish to all

Under the wide and starry sky

Give to me the life I love,

All I seek, the heaven above

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?

A child should always say what’s true,

I have a little shadow that goes in and out

I was the giant great and still

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

In winter I get up at night

Marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

Even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly.

Tip me the black spot.

Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!