Quotes to inspire and reflect

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

If you can actually count your money, then you are not really a rich man.

They’ll tell thee, sailors, when away,

All in the Downs the fleet was moored,

An inconstant woman, tho’ she has no chance to be very happy, can never be very unhappy.

An open foe may prove a curse,

And when a lady’s in the case,

Those who in quarrels interpose,

If with me you’d fondly stray.

How happy could I be with either,

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

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.

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

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

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

on being asked what he thought of modern civilization:

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.

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?

From the lone shieling of the misty island

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.

Eppur si muove.

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

He that plants trees loves others beside himself.

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

Anger is one of the sinews of the soul.

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

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

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

No memory of having starred

I never dared be radical when young

My apple trees will never get across

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

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

Some say the world will end in fire,

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

And nothing to look backward to with pride,

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Most of the change we think we see in life

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

… Life is too much like a pathless wood

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

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