Quotes to inspire and reflect

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

Example is always more efficacious than precept.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

He [the poet] must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.

I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

I am disappointed by that stroke of death, which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.

An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

The father of English criticism.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader.

Language is the dress of thought.

A hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.

Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Patron. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

Lexicographer. A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Network. Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

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

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.

It would be simplistic to say that Divine

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

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.

Hogamus, higamous

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!

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

Of course, of course.

The turn of the screw

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

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.

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.

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.