Quotes to inspire and reflect

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

Suicide: a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

Courtroom: a place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the odds in favor of Judas.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.

A god from the machine.

God bless Captain Vere!

Games in which all may win remain as yet in this world uninvented.

I would prefer not to.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.

The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

Towards thee I roll thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Because of their age-long training in human relations—for that is what feminine intuition really is—women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that relatively few men . . . have incorporated through their education.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

Between the layman’s “ Naturally no human society” and the anthropologist’s “No known human society” lie thousands of detailed and painstaking studies, made by hurricane-lamp and firelight, by explorer and missionary and modern scientists, in many parts of the world.

Warfare . . . is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.

Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother.

As the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. . . . If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

What though before us lies the open grave?

Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

He knew only that the child was his warrant.

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

It’s a mess, aint it Sheriff?

What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

[Thomas Carlyle] loves silence somewhat platonically.

I love Germany so dearly that I hope there will always be two of them.