Quotes to inspire and reflect

This life’s dim windows of the soul

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see

Can wisdom be put in a silver rod?

Some are born to sweet delight,

If the Sun and Moon should doubt,

The whore and gambler, by the State

The strongest poison ever known

A truth that’s told with bad intent

A robin red breast in a cage

To see a world in a grain of sand

That the king can do no wrong, is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

The king never dies.

The royal navy of England hath ever been its greatest defence and ornament; it is its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.

If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.

This policy cannot succeed through speeches, and shooting-matches, and songs; it can only be carried out through blood and iron.

I do not regard the procuring of peace as a matter in which we should play the role of arbiter between different opinions … more that of an honest broker who really wants to press the business forward.

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong, [it is] a geographical concept.

Not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

We will not go to Canossa.

Politics is the art of the possible.

The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.

SAINT , n . A dead sinner revised and edited.

PREJUDICE , n . A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

PEACE , n . In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

HISTORY , n . An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

BATTLE , n . A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

CONSERVATIVE , n . A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

ALLIANCE , n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

APPLAUSE , n . The echo of a platitude.

I [Krishna] am all-powerful Time which destroys all things, and I have come here to slay these men. Even if thou does not fight, all the warriors facing thee shall die. ch. 11, v. 32; see Oppenheimer 253:17

Only by love can men see me, and know me, and come unto me.

If any man thinks he slays, and if another thinks he is slain, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal in man cannot kill: the Eternal in man cannot die.

textual translations are those of J. Mascaro, 1978

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

And moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no

L’élan vital.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

The question is not, Can they reason? nor,

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil.

STREETS FLOODED. PLEASE ADVISE. message sent on arriving in Venice

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

In America there are two classes of travel—first class, and with children.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.

Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm … an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.