Quotes to inspire and reflect

An excellent quotation can annihilate entire pages, indeed an entire book, in that it warns the reader and seems to cry out to him: “Beware, I am the jewel and around me there is lead, pallid, ignominious lead!”

Every tradition now continually grows more venerable the farther away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence; and thus the morality of piety is in any event a much older morality than that which demands unegoistic actions.

In dreams we all resemble this savage.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

Dieu est mort!

[ Explaining why he walked a lobster on a leash in the gardens of the Palais Royal :] I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

The trouble with a kitten is

I want

There was a young belle of old Natchez

I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer.

Every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz.:

Candy

Senator Smoot is an institute

The Bronx?

Gird up your l—ns,

Worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here.

Her exotic daydreams do not prevent her from being small-town bourgeois at heart, clinging to conventional ideas or committing this or that conventional violation of the conventional, adultery being a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

One of those “Two Cultures” is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such “physics” and such “humanities”?

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Like so many aging college people, Pnin had long since ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus.

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

Rome-Berlin axis.

[ To a railway stationmaster :] We must leave exactly on time. . . . From now on everything must function to perfection.

Never mind the bottle, as long as it gets you drunk.

War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it.

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften .

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms. . . . Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

When a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. . . . When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

The two valets sit at the top of the table, but at least I have the honor of being placed above the cooks.

I like to enjoy myself, but rest assured that I can be as serious as anyone else can.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

They shoot the white girl first.

[ Of Bill Clinton :] This is our first black President.

This is not a story to pass on.

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.