Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

And now the matchless deed’s achieved,

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.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.

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

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.

You write with ease, to show your breeding,

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

Here’s to the maiden of bashful fifteen

An unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance!

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

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

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!

Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.

Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Teach me half the gladness

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Our sincerest laughter

The desire of the moth for the star,

Music, when soft voices die,

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

Men of England, wherefore plough

How wonderful is Death,

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Ere Babylon was dust,

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,

Hell is a city much like London.

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.