Quotes to inspire and reflect

August is a wicked month.

A God-intoxicated man. of Spinoza

Rattle his bones over the stones;

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that Fate and character are the same conception.

I brought myself down. I gave them a sword.

When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

There can be no whitewash at the White House.

I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

The great silent majority.

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.

At the base of all these aristocratic races the predator is not to be mistaken, the splendorous blond beast, avidly rampant for plunder and victory.

The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.

God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed.

You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!

O Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief done!

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Hypotheses non fingo.

The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

Cor ad cor loquitur.

We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,

Praise to the Holiest in the height,

Firmly I believe and truly

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

She [the Catholic Church] holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin.

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.

Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.

Two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Je suis le ténébreux,—le veuf,—Vincoonsolé,

Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants;

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,

The cow is of the bovine ilk;

The camel has a single hump;

The turtle lives ’twixt plated decks

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

The whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.