Quotes to inspire and reflect

If landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness, and her glow has warmed the world.

Every one lives by selling something.

We hear the Secretary of State boasting of his brinkmanship—the art of bringing us to the edge of the abyss.

The young man who asks you to set him one heart-beat from the Presidency of the United States.

A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

In America any boy may become President and I suppose it’s just one of the risks he takes!

Let’s talk sense to the American people.

If they [the Republicans] will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

I do not know which to prefer,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

Beauty is momentary in the mind—

Music is feeling, then, not sound.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,

The palm at the end of the mind,

Call the roller of big cigars,

Let be be finale of seem.

Finality is death. Perfection is finality.

I hear a sudden cry of pain!

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

‘What is the answer?’ No answer came. She laughed and said, ‘In that case what is the question?’

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose.

You are all a lost generation.

Remarks are not literature.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

There is no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

A clever theft was praiseworthy amongst the Spartans; and it is equally so amongst Christians, provided it be on a sufficiently large scale.

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity … It is a part of nature.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr Darwin has called ‘natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

Absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such a way that pain shall not be inflicted.

Evolution … is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity.