Quotes to inspire and reflect

Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpoints to hack post-horses.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

See, the conquering hero comes!

This hath not offended the king.

I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and my coming down let me shift for my self.

Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven.

Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified for holding any office at all.

Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?

Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

Oft, in the stilly night,

I never nursed a dear gazelle,

’Tis the last rose of summer

No, there’s nothing half so sweet in life

The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,

The harp that once through Tara’s halls

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books!

If the triangles were to make a God they would give him three sides.

It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.

Que sais-je?

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.

When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn’t amusing herself with me more than I am with her?

If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: ‘Because it was he; because it was me.’

It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.

The value of life lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them; he has lived for a long time who has little lived. Whether you have lived enough depends not on the number of your years but on your will.

One should always have one’s boots on, and be ready to leave.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but caring little for it, and even less about the imperfections of my garden.

on being asked what she wore in bed: Chanel No. 5.

when asked if she really had nothing on in a calendar photograph:

Good heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

One dies only once, and it’s for such a long time!

If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism;

One should eat to live, and not live to eat.

Be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet ’em on your way down.

What I have spoken, is the language of that which is not called amiss The good old Cause.

Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.

What does he [God] then but reveal Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

Peace hath her victories

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint

Cromwell, our chief of men.