Quotes to inspire and reflect

Sabrina fair,

Hence, vain deluding joys,

How charming is divine philosophy!

Against the threats

He that has light within his own clear breast

’Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:

Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of heaven’s joy, Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice, and Verse.

Money couldn’t buy friends but you got a better class of enemy.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

This is Red Hook, not Sicily … This is the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake … A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Death of a salesman.

Justice denied in Massachusetts.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

My candle burns at both ends;

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

No slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.

The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.

Liberty consists in doing what one desires.

A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.

The Conservatives … being by the law of their existence the stupidest party.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

The marble not yet carved can hold the form

Enter these enchanted woods,

The lark ascending.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul

All men have the mind which cannot bear [to see the suffering of] others.

Kissing don’t last: cookery do!

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Whom the gods love dies young.

A whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale … from hell’s heart I stab at thee.