Quotes to inspire and reflect

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Look thy last on all things lovely.

Oh, no man knows

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war!

Art is vice. You don’t marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,

From this amphibious ill-born mob began

Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.

My man Friday.

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,

Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.

He told me … that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness.

One is not born a woman: one becomes one.

They go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

[Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!

The expression often used by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate [than ‘Struggle for Existence’], and is sometimes equally convenient.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits. on man’s probable ancestors

False views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

… Nessun maggior dolore,

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

Il gran rifiuto.

Il maestro di color che sanno.

LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH’ENTRATE!

Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

listen: there’s a hell

plato told

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

a politician is an arse upon

The red badge of courage.

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.