Quotes to inspire and reflect

The strongest poison ever known

If the Sun and Moon should doubt,

A truth that’s told with bad intent

A robin red breast in a cage

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

To see a world in a grain of sand

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.

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

The king never dies.

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

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.

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

Not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

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

We will not go to Canossa.

Politics is the art of the possible.

SAINT , n . A dead sinner revised and edited.

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

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

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

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

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.

APPLAUSE , n . The echo of a platitude.

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.

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.

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

textual translations are those of J. Mascaro, 1978

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

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

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

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

L’élan vital.

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

The question is not, Can they reason? nor,

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,

Do you remember an Inn,

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: