Quotes to inspire and reflect

Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster.

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Boredom is … a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

There is no wealth but life.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one.

All violent feelings … produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

It means everything—it means freedom.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity.

Somehow a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.

A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

When I am dead, my dearest,

Doctor, my doctor, what do you say, LET’S g PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!

Better by far you should forget and smile

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

In the bleak mid-winter

For there is no friend like a sister

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Come to me in the silence of the night;

I have got such a bully pulpit!

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ‘weasel words’. When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ‘weasel word’ after another, there is nothing left of the other.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.

The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

I am as strong as a bull moose and you can use me to the limit.