Quotes to inspire and reflect

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

Music is feeling, then, not sound.

Beauty is momentary in the mind—

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,

The palm at the end of the mind,

Let be be finale of seem.

Call the roller of big cigars,

Finality is death. Perfection is finality.

I hear a sudden cry of pain!

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

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

Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma.

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

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?’

You are all a lost generation.

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

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

Remarks are not literature.

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

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

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.

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

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.

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.

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’.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The Gulag archipelago.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

How many things I can do without!

This Englishwoman is so refined