Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

We boil at different degrees.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.

To fill the hour—that is happiness.

Language is fossil poetry.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’

There is properly no history; only biography.

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

Art is a jealous mistress.

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

Make yourself necessary to someone.

I am the doubter and the doubt.

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

If the red slayer think he slays,

Adieu tristesse

To me … [ The Waste Land ] was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,

Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.

Webster was much possessed by death

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

One of the low on whom assurance sits

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.

But at my back from time to time I hear

I think we are in rats’ alley

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.