Quotes to inspire and reflect

Science is organized knowledge.

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.

One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

I am putting old heads on your young shoulders … all my pupils are the crème de la crème.

Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

There are many wonderful things, and nothing is more wonderful than man.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.

The Gulag archipelago.

I am not Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world.

Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; please pay it and don’t forget it.

It is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will actually exist in another world.

But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can without any difficulty contradict Socrates.

Virtue does not come from money, but from virtue comes money and all other good things to man, both to the individual and to the state.

It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.

How many things I can do without!

This Englishwoman is so refined

I was much too far out all my life

A good time was had by all.

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

And now the matchless deed’s achieved,

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.

Still falls the Rain—

And quiet flows the Don.

Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.

A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.

You write with ease, to show your breeding,

Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen

An unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance!

You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.

Here is the whole set! a character dead at every word.

If I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!

She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.

Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.

He is the very pineapple of politeness!

Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.