Quotes to inspire and reflect

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.

So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

It is not best to swap horses when crossing streams.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honourable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.

The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

I think the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and heartstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

To give victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

Our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.

In her [Nature’s] inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?

Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.

The best fame is a writer’s fame: it’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough that you get interrupted when you eat.

The Pobble who has no toes

He has gone to fish, for his Aunt Jobiska’s

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea

‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’

There was an old man of Thermopylae,

Far and few, far and few,

On the coast of Coromandel

The Dong with a luminous nose.

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who, or why, or which, or what,

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

A beginning, a muddle, and an end.

Why should I let the toad work

Man hands on misery to man.

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

And that will be England gone,

Life is first boredom, then fear.

What will survive of us is love.

What are days for?