Quotes to inspire and reflect

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.

Remember that time is money.

Some are weather-wise, some are otherwise.

They [the poor] have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.

In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

History is more or less bunk.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Books are made not like children but like pyramids … and they’re just as useless! and they stay in the desert! … Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.

There are no second acts in American lives.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Her voice is full of money.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

Hell, I never vote for anybody. I always vote against.

Fish fuck in it.

Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.

It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.

Never give a sucker an even break.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.

The shape of Africa resembles a revolver, and the Congo is the trigger.

My tongue swore, but my mind’s unsworn. Hippolytus lamenting his breaking of an oath

In regione caecorum rex est luscus.

Everything has two handles, by one of which it ought to be carried and by the other not.

If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Glittering generalities! They are blazing ubiquities.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

We boil at different degrees.

There never was a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get asleep.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.