Quotes to inspire and reflect

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

And he, whose fustian’s so sublimely bad,

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

Pretty! in amber to observe the forms

You think this cruel? take it for a rule,

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

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;

Sir, I admit your gen’ral rule

How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!

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

On all the line a sudden vengeance waits,

Vital spark of heav’nly flame!

All crowd, who foremost shall be damned to

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale.

The glory that was Greece

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

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

All that we see or seem

The fever called ‘Living’

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

I was a child and she was a child,

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.

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

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.

The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.

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.

And so with the objects of knowledge: these derive from the Good not only their power of being known, but their very being and reality; and Goodness is not the same thing as being, but even beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power.

Behold! human beings living in a underground den … Like ourselves … they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

Can we devise one of those lies—the kind which crop up as the occasion demands, which we were talking about not so long ago—so that with a single noble lie we can indocrinate the rulers themselves, preferably, but at least the rest of the community?

What I say is that ‘just’ or ‘right’ means nothing but what is in the interest of the stronger party.

This was the end, Echekrates, of our friend; a man of whom we may say that of all whom we met at that time he was the wisest and justest and best.

Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?

Socrates, he says, breaks the law by corrupting young men and not recognizing the gods that the city recognizes, but some other new deities.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The woman is perfected

Every woman adores a Fascist,

Is there no way out of the mind?

I have always been scared of you,

Six characters in search of an author.

Mankind is a dream of a shadow.

Water is best. But gold shines like fire blazing in the night, supreme of lordly wealth.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms … The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael: it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.