Quotes to inspire and reflect

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:

For what can war, but endless war still breed?

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,

Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves.

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

But that two-handed engine at the door

Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorrèd shears,

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Let us with a gladsome mind

Such sights as youthful poets dream

Towered cities please us then,

Where perhaps some beauty lies,

Meadows trim with daisies pied,

Come, and trip it as ye go

Nods, and becks, and wreathèd smiles.

Hence, loathèd Melancholy,

Hide me from day’s garish eye.

And storied windows richly dight,

Far from all resort of mirth,

Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,

Hence, vain deluding joys,

Sabrina fair,

How charming is divine philosophy!

Against the threats

’Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:

He that has light within his own clear breast

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

Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.