Quotes to inspire and reflect

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.

You may shoot me with your words,

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

It doesn’t matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you’re hatched from a swan’s egg!

And so they could see she was a real princess, because she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdowns.

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.

The Emperor’s new clothes.

Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.

More will mean worse.

on expanding universities

Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;

They write about it.

Can get by without it.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work … I want to achieve it through not dying.

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

On bisexuality: It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me and she said ‘no’.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam

Committee—a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

I’m the greatest.

Countless chuckles of the waves of the sea.

Hell to ships, hell to men, hell to cities.

‘We are always doing’, says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.’

See in what peace a Christian can die. dying words to his stepson Lord Warwick

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.

Sir Roger told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgement rashly, that much might be said on both sides.

I have often thought, says Sir Roger, it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the Middle of Winter.

From hence, let fierce contending nations know

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

What pity is it

When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

And, pleased th’ Almighty’s orders to

The jaws of power are always opened to devour.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.