Quotes to inspire and reflect

He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

America is now given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.

The scarlet letter.

If, of all words of tongue and pen,

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.

If this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up and be shot at.

When I set out for Lyonnesse,

Woman much missed, how you call to me,

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,

What of the faith and fire within us

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

I am the family face;

There trembled through

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

In a solitude of the sea

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything.

After two thousand years of mass

‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.

Dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

Done because we are too menny.

War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go … Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the hand with which we hold off death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.

She who must be obeyed.

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?

In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

He saw; but blasted with excess of light,

Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

What female heart can gold despise?

Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes

To each his suff’rings, all are men,

Where ignorance is bliss,

Alas, regardless of their doom,

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,

Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.

Can storied urn or animated bust

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,