Quotes to inspire and reflect

Sexual intercourse

In the castle of my skin.

When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed,

The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

[A pun] is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Books think for me.

Not many sounds in life … exceed in interest a knock at the door.

Your borrowers of books —those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.

Presents, I often say, endear Absents.

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.

Ah! que la vie est quotidienne.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.

Le commencement et le déclin de l’amour se font sentir par l’embarras où l’on est de se trouver seuls.

Il faut rire avant que d’être heureux, de peur de mourir sans avoir ri.

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view) consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

The unbearable lightness of being.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.

Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me for ever.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

An active line on a walk, moving freely without a goal. A walk for walk’s sake.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

Power is the great aphrodisiac.

Power without responsibility: the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walked down a street.

He swathed himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it takes a very clever woman to manage a fool.

The man who would be king.

Little Friend of all the World.

I keep six honest serving-men

He was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity.

The great grey-green, greasy, Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees.

An Elephant’s Child—who was full of ’satiable curtiosity.

And he went back through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

We be of one blood, thou and I.

The motto of all the mongoose family is, ‘Run and find out.’

When you’re wounded and left on

They settled things by making up a saying,

Take up the White Man’s burden—

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;