Quotes to inspire and reflect

[ Socrates speaking :] If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

[ Of Socrates :] Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

[ Socrates speaking :] Life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

[ Socrates speaking :] Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?

Dying

[ Socrates speaking, describing the charge against him :] Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Yes, but haven’t you perceived that it isn’t possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

My boy, it’s your last resort.

[I am] only a public entertainer, who has understood his time.

The work is done by people who have not yet attained final placement at their level of incompetence.

Was it worthy? Everything is worthy.

Every post tends to be occupied by an employee incompetent to execute its duties.

It belongs to my lord the Marquis of Carabas.

The poet is a pretender.

We are condemned

Wit invents ; inspiration reveals .

No doubt the nearness of death and the brotherhood of men-at-arms, at whatever time and in whatever country, always produces an atmosphere favorable to the extraordinary, to all that rises above the human condition and breaks the circle of solitude that surrounds each one of us.

The North American wants to use reality rather than to know it.

No second Johannesburg is needed upon the earth. One is enough.

Weltschmerz .

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.

I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men . . . desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it. . . . I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.

Yet the order of the acts is planned

One day Lara went out and did not come back. . . . She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was afterwards mislaid.

All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point .

Dieu est, ou il n’est pas. Mais de quel côté pencherons-nous? La raison n’y peut rien déterminer. Il y’a un chaos infini qui nous sépare. Il se joue un jeu, à l’extrémité de cette distance infinie, où il arrivera croix ou pile: que gagerez-vous?

Pesons le gain et la perte, en prenant croix que Dieu est. Estimons ces deux cas: Si vous gagnez, vous gagnez tout; si vous perdez, vous ne perdez rien. Gagez donc qu’il est, sans hésiter!

We shall die alone.

L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c’est un roseau pensant .

How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.

What is it, then, that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.

Le nez de Cléopâtre s’il eût été plus court toute la face de la terre aurait changé .

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte .

The two ladies [Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce] were trying to get out of a doorway at the same time. Clare drew back and cracked, “Age before beauty, Miss Parker.” As Dotty swept out, she turned to the other guests and said, “Pearls before swine.”

Then I remember her comment on one friend who had lamed herself while in London. It was Mrs. Parker who voiced the suspicion that this poor lady had injured herself while sliding down a barrister.

And there was that wholesale libel on a Yale prom. If all the girls attending it were laid end to end, Mrs. Parker said, she wouldn’t be at all surprised.

People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what’s the use of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.

[ Habitual response upon hearing the doorbell or telephone ring :] What fresh hell is this?

[ On being warned by her doctor that if she didn’t stop drinking she would be dead within a month :] Promises, promises!

I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.

[ On being told at a party that people were ducking for apples :] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

[ On being informed that editor Harold Ross had called her on her honeymoon demanding a belated article :] Tell Ross I’m too fucking busy and vice versa.

[ Upon being challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence :] You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.

[ Advice to a friend whose ailing cat had to be “put away” :] Have you tried curiosity?

[ Completing the nursery rhyme “Higgledy piggledy, my white hen; / She lays eggs for gentlemen” :] You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat To come across for the proletariat.