Quotes to inspire and reflect

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

Not in the clamour of the crowded street,

Life is real! Life is earnest!

A boy’s will is the wind’s will

The heights by great men reached and kept

The holiest of all holidays are those

I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls

This is the forest primeval.

The shades of night were falling fast,

The cares that infest the day

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it;

Between the dark and the daylight,

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

I shot an arrow into the air,

The call of the wild.

The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.

Come to the edge.

The only way by which any one divests himself of his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community.

Man being … by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.

The end of law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.

Whatsoever … [man] removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

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

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

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.

It is not best to swap horses when crossing streams.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?