Quotes to inspire and reflect

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

Courtroom: a place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the odds in favor of Judas.

A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

A god from the machine.

But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.

God bless Captain Vere!

Games in which all may win remain as yet in this world uninvented.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

I would prefer not to.

A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

One trembles to think of that mysterious thing in the soul, which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction, but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts.

Towards thee I roll thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in this world.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Because of their age-long training in human relations—for that is what feminine intuition really is—women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that relatively few men . . . have incorporated through their education.

Between the layman’s “ Naturally no human society” and the anthropologist’s “No known human society” lie thousands of detailed and painstaking studies, made by hurricane-lamp and firelight, by explorer and missionary and modern scientists, in many parts of the world.

Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

Warfare . . . is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.

Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. . . . If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

What though before us lies the open grave?

As the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto.

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

It’s a mess, aint it Sheriff?

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

What’s the most you ever saw lost on a coin toss?

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

[Thomas Carlyle] loves silence somewhat platonically.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

What would have happened if she hadn’t lost the necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how full of changes! How little it takes to doom you or save you!

I love Germany so dearly that I hope there will always be two of them.

It is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it: if you utterly decline to make do with what you get, then somehow or other you are very likely to get what you want.

You cannot imagine the kindness I’ve received at the hands of perfect strangers.

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.