Quotes to inspire and reflect

Some praise at morning what they blame at night;

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance.

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

As some to church repair,

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,

Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.

Old politicians chew on wisdom past,

Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone,

Odious! in woollen! ’twould a saint provoke!

’Tis use alone that sanctifies expense.

’Tis education forms the common mind,

Consult the genius of the place in all.

The ruling passion, be it what it will,

Die, and endow a college, or a cat.

Unlearn’d, he knew no schoolman’s subtle art,

‘Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

Pretty! in amber to observe the forms

And he, whose fustian’s so sublimely bad,

The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

You think this cruel? take it for a rule,

Sir, I admit your gen’ral rule

How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;

On all the line a sudden vengeance waits,

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,

Vital spark of heav’nly flame!

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale.

All crowd, who foremost shall be damned to

The glory that was Greece

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.

Ghastly, grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore—

The fever called ‘Living’

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

All that we see or seem

I was a child and she was a child,

He who cheats with an oath acknowledges that he is afraid of his enemy, but that he thinks little of God.

For we are told that when a certain man was accusing both of them to him, he [Caesar] said that he had no fear of those fat and long-haired fellows, but rather of those pale and thin ones.

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

God is always doing geometry.

But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever.