Quotes to inspire and reflect

Que sais-je?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Cromwell, our chief of men.

Peace hath her victories

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Licence they mean when they cry liberty;

When I consider how my light is spent,

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail.

Time the subtle thief of youth.

The sun to me is dark

Just are the ways of God,

Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

He who seeking asses found a kingdom.

The first and wisest of them all professed

But on occasion’s forelock watchful wait.

The childhood shows the man,

A paradise within thee, happier far.

The world was all before them, where to choose

The evening star,

Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy

Flesh of flesh,

… Yet I shall temper so

O fairest of creation, last and best

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat