Quotes to inspire and reflect

Elle est retrouvée .

Beauty is nothing

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Don’t

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn’t inhale.

We are, I am, you are

I stroke the beam of my lamp

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

I put on

Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

[ To the surgeons about to operate on him after he was shot by John Hinckley :] Please tell me you’re Republicans.

War is a condition of progress; the whip-cut that prevents a country from going to sleep and forces satisfied mediocrity to shake off its apathy.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . . We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home for Christmas.

I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease. . . . I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

I did say something in our negotiations in Iceland in Russian: Dovorey no provorey . That means trust, but verify.

Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

We’re especially not going to tolerate these attacks from outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.

I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my day.

[ Referring to his younger opponent, Walter Mondale :] I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.

In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.

Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision it might be well if you would ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

[ To his Democratic opponent Jimmy Carter :]

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

Who is John Galt?

Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.

Howard Roark laughed.

The day is not purer than the depths of my heart.

Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée :

The appetite grows by eating.

Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr!

You talk, you talk, that’s all you know how to do.

Rire est le propre de l’homme .

Outside of this cell we may have our oppressors, yes, but not inside. Here no one oppresses the other. The only thing that seems to disturb me . . . because I’m exhausted, or conditioned, or perverted . . . is that someone wants to be nice to me, without asking anything back for it.

Blessed is he who leaves the glory

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur. . . . This life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book! How happy would be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him!

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu .