Quotes to inspire and reflect

If with me you’d fondly stray.

The comfortable estate of widowhood, is the only hope that keeps up a wife’s spirits.

Our Polly is a sad slut! nor heeds what we have taught her.

Do you think your mother and I should have lived comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married?

The compact which exists between the North and the South is ‘a covenant with death and an agreement with hell’.

Our country is the world—our countrymen are all mankind.

on being asked what he thought of modern civilization:

I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard!

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states.

Eppur si muove.

From the lone shieling of the misty island

We are all Adam’s children but silk makes the difference.

Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe … This book is written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help … one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

Light (God’s eldest daughter) is a principal beauty in building.

He that plants trees loves others beside himself.

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

No memory of having starred

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

I never dared be radical when young

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

My apple trees will never get across

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Some say the world will end in fire,

And nothing to look backward to with pride,

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee

Most of the change we think we see in life

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

Technology … the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.

… Life is too much like a pathless wood

There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market. In politics, individuals who seek to promote only the public good are led by an invisible hand to promote special interests that it was no part of their intention to promote.

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

All that matters is love and work.

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’

Anatomy is destiny.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

Man is a tool-making animal.

What is the use of a new-born child?

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

There never was a good war, or a bad peace.