Quotes to inspire and reflect

You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you.

It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.” . . .

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.

It makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . . It’s sort of what we have instead of God.

It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.

Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.

Auf Flügeln des Gesanges . On Wings of Song.

Die Sprache spricht .

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.

Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency, becomes a real and ratified existence.

The History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.

History says don’t hope

Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

I rhyme

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.

I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.

One has no notion of him [William Cobbett] as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers. . . . He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; “lays waste” a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

This play [ Hamlet ] has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history.

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader’s mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

[ Of the Spanish-American War :] It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.

“It is very lonesome at the summit!” “Like a man’s life, when he has climbed to eminence.”

It is my belief—yes, and my prophecy, should I die before it happens—that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man. Thus far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats! We mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid.

God will give him blood to drink!

Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral;—the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

What we did had a consecration of its own.

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Let the black flower blossom as it may!

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.

The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.

If we do discover a complete theory [of the universe], it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”