Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

All that matters is love and work.

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

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.

What is the use of a new-born child?

Man is a tool-making animal.

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

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

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

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

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

Some are weather-wise, some are otherwise.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

Remember that time is money.

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

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.

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.

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.

History is more or less bunk.

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.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

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.

There are no second acts in American lives.

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.

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

Her voice is full of money.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Fish fuck in it.

Never give a sucker an even break.

Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.

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

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

Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.

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