Quotes to inspire and reflect

Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a man hasn’t sense enough to know whom to despise.

Good, but not religious-good.

Nought availed; I was dying helplessly, with my eyes wide open—staring straight up at the roof. At length, I stuck my forefinger in my mouth, and took to sucking it. Something stirred in my brain, a thought that bored its way in there—a stark-mad notion. Supposing I were to take a bite? And without a moment’s reflection, I shut my eyes, and clenched my teeth on it. I sprang up. At last I was thoroughly awake.

The difference between a common man and a recognized poet is, that one has been deluded, and cured of his delusion, and the other continues deluded all his days.

I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

It was during the time I wandered about and starved in Christiana: Christiana, this singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the traces of his sojourn there.

Dos, tres . . . muchos Vietnam .

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.

In a revolution, one either triumphs or dies.

Revolution that does not constantly become more profound is a regressive revolution.

The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.

He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.

If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Sweet is the breath of vernal shower,

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

For me, the naked and the nude

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast

The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen bee whose embrace is death.

As you are woman, so be lovely:

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.

You can declare at the very start that it’s impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your back, so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.

How marvelous is Man! How proud the word rings—Man!

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

I want a film that begins with an earthquake and works up to a climax.

“And he was as intelligent as other people, his soul was pure and clear as crystal; he was noble and affectionate—and yet he did nothing!”

I can answer you in two words, “Im possible.”

It rolls off my back like a duck.

[ Of his film The Best Years of Our Lives before its opening, 1946 :] I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel, I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it.

Our comedies are not to be laughed at.

[ Of films with “messages” :] Messages are for Western Union.

[ When urged to write his autobiography :] Oh no. I can’t do that—not until long after I’m dead.

I’ll give you a definite maybe.

At church, with meek and unaffected grace,

But soon a wonder came to light

I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too.

[Are not] you too, Russia, speeding along like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake? . . . Everything on earth is flying past, and looking askance, other nations and states draw aside and make way.

History of Little Goody Two-Shoes.

If any one asks me for good advice, I say I will give it, but only on condition that you promise me not to take it.

Classicism is health, romanticism is disease.

His high rank, as an English peer, was very injurious to Byron, for all genius is oppressed by the outer world;—how much more by high rank and great possessions! The middle station is most favorable to genius; you find the great artists and poets there.

I compare the earth and her atmosphere to a great living being perpetually inhaling and exhaling.