Quotes to inspire and reflect

Liberties … depend on the silence of the law.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Television has brought back murder into the home—where it belongs.

All a green willow, willow;

Actors are cattle.

The half is greater than the whole.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

He that lives in hope danceth without music.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

When God at first made man,

If goodness lead him not, yet weariness

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

The land of spices; something understood.

A servant with this clause

Who says that fictions only and false hair

Teach me, my God and King,

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild

I struck the board, and cried, ‘No more.

Away; take heed:

You can’t step twice into the same river.

Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing

Everything flows and nothing stays.

Grace under pressure.

Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier.

Maximilien Robespierre was nothing but the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.

What then is music? … It exists between thought and phenomenon, like a twilight medium, it stands between spirit and matter, related to and yet different from both; it is spirit, but spirit governed by time; it is matter, but matter that can manage without space.

Auf Flügeln des Gesanges.

The famous

Dort, wo man Bücher

Don’t be surprised

Between my finger and my thumb

Well, I’ve had a happy life.

But then, once in a lifetime

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

We can scarcely hate any one that we know.