Quotes to inspire and reflect

As you are woman, so be lovely:

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.

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.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

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.

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

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.

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.

Our comedies are not to be laughed at.

[ 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.

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

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

At church, with meek and unaffected grace,

I’ll give you a definite maybe.

But soon a wonder came to light

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

History of Little Goody Two-Shoes.

[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.

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.

[ “Last words” :] Mehr Licht!

Amerika, du hast es besser—als unser Kontinent, das alte .

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust .

Was man in der Jugend wünscht, hat man im Alter die Fülle .

Das also war des Pudels Kern .

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint .

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.

Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt .

We can’t form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us. Raise them the best we can, and leave them free to develop.

Nur, wer die Sehnsucht kennt ,

Noble be man,

Du musst herrschen und gewinnen ,

Er kann mich im Arsch lecken .

Der Zauberlehrling .

Les affaires, c’est l’argent des autres!

Even he did not get to keep that lovely body.

With the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

There is nothing to be learned from history any more. We’re in science fiction now.

I’d better get right down to the job.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?