Quotes to inspire and reflect

Proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba.

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est.

Brevis esse laboro,

To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop-pail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.

Inceptis gravibus plerumque et magna professis Purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter Adsuitur pannus.

My heart in hiding

Birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

It ís the blight man was born for,

Áh! ás the heart grows older

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

What would the world be, once bereft

I have desired to go

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

Elected Silence, sing to me

Towery city and branchy between towers;

Well, I’m still here.

Oh, for an hour of Herod!

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.

Economy is going without something you do want in case you should, some day, want something you probably won’t want.

Athene sent them a following breeze, a strong west wind that whistled over the wine-dark sea.

Rosy-fingered dawn.

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered far and wide after he had sacked Troy’s sacred city, and saw the towns of many men and knew their mind.

It lies in the lap of the gods.

Smiling through her tears.

Very like leaves

Winged words.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. sometimes quoted as, ‘shouting fire in a crowded theatre’

Achilles’ cursed anger sing, O goddess, that son of Peleus, which started a myriad sufferings for the Achaeans.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

It is better to be seventy years young than forty years old!

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

We pause to … recall what our country has done for each of us and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.

The papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

Liberties … depend on the silence of the law.

Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

By art is created that great Leviathan, called a commonwealth or state, (in Latin civitas) which is but an artificial man … and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul.

Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.