Quotes to inspire and reflect

I hate flowers—I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

thinking of

I get a little Verlaine

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

For what links us are elemental experiences—emotions—forces that have no intrinsic language and must be imagined as art if they are to be contemplated at all.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

Spinotza ist ein gotttrunkener Mensch .

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

[The Nobel Peace Prize shall be awarded to] the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

[ Remark to General Alexander Haig, 7 Aug. 1974 :] You fellows, in your business, have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don’t have a pistol.

[ Of John Dean :] A loose cannon.

I hope that . . . television, radio, and the press first recognize the great responsibility they have to report all the news and, second, recognize that they have a right and a responsibility, if they are against a candidate—give him the shaft. But also recognize, if they give him the shaft—put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says, now and then.

In the past few days . . . it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort [to remain in office as president despite the Watergate scandal]. . . . But with the disappearance of that base, I now believe that the constitutional purpose has been served, and there is no longer a need for the process to be prolonged.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President I must put the interests of America first. . . . Therefore, I shall resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow.

[ Requesting aides to resist exposure of Watergate scandal :] I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan.

[ On the Watergate scandal :] There can be no whitewash at the White House.

If when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation . . . acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.

North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

After a third of a century of power flowing from the people and the States to Washington it is time for a New Federalism in which power, funds, and responsibility will flow from Washington to the States and to the people.

[ Welcoming back the crew of Apollo 11 from the first moon landing :] This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.

The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.

[ Quoting a sign held up by a young girl on the campaign trail :] Bring us together again.

[ After being defeated for governor of California :] You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

Pat [his wife] doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.

Electric flesh-arrows . . . traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eye-lids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

The kids, like all kids, loved the dog [Checkers], and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that every thing that is born of her is planted in her.

It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations .

I believe only in French culture and consider everything else in Europe today that calls itself “culture” a misunderstanding—not to speak of German culture.

Liberal institutions straightway cease to be liberal, as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

God created woman. And indeed, that was the end of boredom—but of other things too! Woman was God’s second mistake.

What can largely be achieved by punishment, in man or beast, is the increase of fear, the intensification of intelligence, the mastering of desires: punishment tames man in this way but does not make him “better”—we would be more justified in asserting the opposite.

Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll .

At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

When Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead! ”

Gott ist tot: aber so wie die Art der Menschen ist, wird es vielleicht noch Jahrtausende lang Höhlen geben, in denen man seinen Schatten zeigt.—Und wir—wir müssen auch noch seinen Schatten besiegen!

An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: “Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!”

When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

In dreams we all resemble this savage.

[ Explaining why he walked a lobster on a leash in the gardens of the Palais Royal :] I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.