Quotes to inspire and reflect

The party programs grab hold of every young and promising idea and wring its neck.

I love this town so much that I’d rather destroy it than see it prosper on a lie.

Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population—the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority. But I’ll be damned if that means it’s right that the fools should dominate the intelligent.

The life of a normally constituted truth is generally, say, about seventeen or eighteen years, at most twenty; rarely longer. But truths as elderly as that have always worn terribly thin. But it’s only then that the majority will have anything to do with them; then it will recommend them as wholesome food for thought. But there’s no great food-value in that sort of diet.

The majority is never right.

This meeting declares that it considers Dr. Thomas Stockmann, Medical Officer to the Baths, to be an enemy of the people.

I have another duty equally sacred. . . . My duty to myself.

I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light.

If I’m ever to reach any understanding of myself and the things around me, I must learn to stand alone. That’s why I can’t stay here with you any longer.

And you call yourselves pillars of society!

She knew well she was to give me All or Nothing!

Turn to the Jewish nation, the nobility of the human race. How has it preserved itself—isolated, poetical—despite all the barbarity from without? Because it had no state to burden it. Had the Jewish nation remained in Palestine, it would long since have been ruined in the process of construction, like all the other nations.

I have always been Darwin’s bulldog.

[ Replying to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in their debate on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Oxford, England, 30 June 1860 :] A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man —a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the “Origin” [Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species ], was, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”

Truly it has been said, that to a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be seen.

Science is, I believe, nothing but trained and organised common sense , differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?

[ Describing a mescaline-induced experience :] I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers—what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!

The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

“If you look up ‘Intelligence’ in the new volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ,” he had said, “you’ll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather’s a present specimen of Intelligence, Military.”

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

Bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave , and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercis’d more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities, with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means, which she affords to the relieving these necessities.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées .

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Dismal plain!

Le mot, c’est le Verbe, et le Verbe, c’est Dieu .

Oh! que ne suis-je de pierre comme toi!

Les États Unis d’Europe .

Asile!

Stilled legendary depth:

Pike, three inches long, perfect

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

Grey silent fragments

“It’s powerful,” he said.

As I learn from you,

I swear to the Lord

It is the duty of the younger Negro artist . . . to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!”

Hold fast to dreams