Quotes to inspire and reflect

I saw pale kings and princes too,

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability , that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

“Life is trouble,” Zorba continued. “Death, no. To live—do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!”

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky.

Act so that you use humanity, as much in your own person as in the person of every other, always at the same time as end and never merely as means.

There is nothing it is possible to think of anywhere in the world, or indeed anything at all outside it, that can be held to be good without limitation, excepting only a good will .

Finally, there is one imperative that, without being grounded on any other aim to be achieved through a certain course of conduct as its condition, commands this conduct immediately. This imperative is categorical . . . . This imperative may be called that of morality .

This village belongs to the Castle, and whoever lives here or passes the night here does so in a manner of speaking in the Castle itself. Nobody may do that without the Count’s permission.

“Like a dog!” he said: it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.

You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such.

Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.

No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.

Maxima debetur puero reverentia .

Omnia Romae cum pretio .

I want to give a picture [in Ulysses ] of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?

When a young man came up to him in Zurich and said, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses? ” Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, “No, it did lots of other things too.”

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.

He kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.

Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

[ Upon being asked whether he intended to become a Protestant :] I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.

[ Of Dwight Eisenhower, whose death pushed Joplin off the cover of Newsweek:] Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Get It While You Can.

Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

[ On William Shakespeare :] Reader, look

Down on me, down on me

[ On Shakespeare’s portrait :]

Coupling doesn’t always have to do with sex. . . . Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is out to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.

The Continental ship Providence, now lying at Boston, is bound on a short cruise, immediately; a few good men are wanted to make up her complement.

Fear of Flying.

The law is a jealous science.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

[ On overindulgence in drink, to the extent of becoming a beast :] He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

[ To two women who commended him on his omission of vulgar words from his Dictionary of the English Language:] What! my dears! then you have been looking for them?