Quotes to inspire and reflect

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.

[ “Last words” :] Money can’t buy life.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism , because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni , and antiquarians. For too long Italy has been a dealer in secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace .

Many people think it is impossible for the guerrilla to exist long in the enemy’s realm. Such a belief reveals a lack of understanding of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish that swim in it.

All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked.

But then there comes that moment rare

The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. . . . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

[ Remark after arriving in New York, N.Y., 21 Feb. 1938 :] Where I am, there is Germany.

If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.

The extermination camps, in endeavoring to turn man into a beast, intimated that it is not life alone which makes him man.

Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud. . . . Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard .

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu .

Tel qu’en Lui-Même enfin l’éternité le change .

And a rose, she lived as roses do, the space of a morn.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

Hating England is a form of self-defense. That kind of nationalism is nothing more than a local manifestation of a concern for human rights.

Since a prince is constrained by necessity to know well how to use the beast, among [the beasts] he must choose the fox and the lion; because the lion does not defend itself from traps, the fox does not defend itself from the wolves. One therefore needs to be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to dismay the wolves.

And nowhere, surely, should we discover more painful and absolute sacrifice. . . . The queen bids farewell to freedom, the light of day. . . . The workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity.

Many have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that no one has ever seen or known to be in reality. Because how one ought to live is so far removed from how one lives that he who lets go of what is done for that which one ought to do sooner learns ruin than his own preservation.

From this springs a dispute: whether it is better to be loved than feared or the reverse. It is answered that one would want to be both; but, because it is difficult to force them together whenever one has to do without either of the two, it is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Nothing is more difficult to transact, nor more dubious to succeed, nor more dangerous to manage, than to make oneself chief to introduce new orders. Because the introducer has for enemies all those whom the old orders benefit, and has for lukewarm defenders all those who might benefit by the new orders.

A prince must not have any objective nor any thought, nor take up any art, other than the art of war and its ordering and discipline; because it is the only art that pertains to him who commands. And it is of such virtue that not only does it maintain those who were born princes, but many times makes men rise to that rank from private station.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Men must either be caressed or extinguished; because they avenge themselves of light offenses, but of the grave ones they cannot. So the offense one does to a man must be such that one not fear vengeance for it.

It is better to fall from above the clouds than from the third floor.

Marcela loved me during fifteen months and three thousand dollars; nothing more.

Freiheit ist immer nur Freiheit des anders Denkenden .

Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.

History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.

A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue.

Ut quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum .

[ Words upon resuming a lecture after being imprisoned for five years, Salamanca University, 1577 :] We were saying yesterday . . .

Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur ,

Nil posse creari de nilo .

Whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the other [Democratic side], it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties.

All history shows that the hand that cradles the rock has ruled the world, not the hand that rocks the cradle!

But much of what Mr. [Vice-President Henry] Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still “globaloney.” Mr. Wallace’s warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.

You know, that’s the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother.

It is not granted to know which man took up arms with more right on his side. Each pleads his cause before a great judge: the winning cause pleased the gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato.

Nature abhors . . . a virgin—a frozen asset.