Quotes to inspire and reflect

[ Captain :] I do my best to satisfy you all—

And I think it only right

[ Captain :] And I’m never, never sick at sea!

Then give three cheers, and one cheer more,

[ Captain :] I am the Captain of the Pinafore ;

[ In response to being asked who was the greatest nineteenth-century poet :] Hugo,—hélas!

Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent .

Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.

Everything has been said before; but since nobody listens, we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

If you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.

[ Remark to reporters after his grandson had been kidnapped and a ransom payment was demanded, Guildford, England, 26 July 1973 :] I have 14 other grandchildren and if I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 other kidnapped grandchildren.

I know you lawyers can, with ease,

Life is a jest; and all things show it.

A miss for pleasure, and a wife for breed.

Toute passe.—L’art robuste

I confess indeed that the Fermat theorem as an isolated proposition has little interest for me, since a multitude of such propositions, which one can neither prove nor refute, can be easily promulgated.

640K ought to be enough for anyone.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on the earth.

At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

[ Upon being asked what he thought of Western civilization :] It would be a good idea.

I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.

“Hate the sin and not the sinner” is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.

Satyagraha largely appears to the public as Civil Disobedience or Civil Resistance. It is civil in the sense that it is not criminal. . . . [The civil resister] considers certain laws to be so unjust as to render obedience to them a dishonor. He then openly and civilly breaks them and quietly suffers the penalty for their breach.

Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. But in the past, noncooperation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evildoer. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent noncooperation only multiplies evil and that evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence.

Desiring to remove from the minds of Your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion rightly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unpretended faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies . . . and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert verbally or in writing, anything that might cause a similar suspicion toward me.

[ Alleged remark after recanting his position that the earth moves around the sun, 1632 :] Eppur si muove .

Much of the world’s work, it has been said, is done by men who do not feel quite well. Marx is a case in point.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. . . . It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which . . . one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.

The leisure class has been replaced by another and much larger class to which work has none of the older connotation of pain, fatigue, or other mental or physical discomfort. We have failed to observe the emergence of this New Class, as it may be simply called.

[ When asked how many husbands she had had :]

Be you never so high the law is above you.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

And were an epitaph to be my story

My little horse must think it queer

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom . . . in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

I met a Californian who would

But if it had to perish twice,

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I shall be telling this with a sigh

I see him there

“I should have called it