Quotes to inspire and reflect

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Lexicographer. A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.

It would be simplistic to say that Divine

Noche oscura.

Muero porque no muero.

I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in.

If civil authorities legislate for or allow anything that is contrary to that order and therefore contrary to the will of God, neither the laws made or the authorizations granted can be binding on the consciences of the citizens, since God has more right to be obeyed than man.

It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, people couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.

Hogamus, higamous

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!

Of course, of course.

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon … the two most beautiful words in the English language.

The turn of the screw

We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million … but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

The note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there!

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?

Before you judge me, try hard to love me, look within your heart

Castles in the air—they are so easy to take refuge in. And easy to build, too.

On the contrary.

But good God, people don’t do such things!

Mother, give me the sun.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

The majority never has right on its side.

The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

Money … is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.

The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions.