Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The leisure class has been replaced by another and much larger class to which work has none of the older connotation of pain, fatigue, or other mental or physical discomfort.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 :]

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.

And were an epitaph to be my story

Be you never so high the law is above you.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

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

My little horse must think it queer

But if it had to perish twice,

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I see him there

I shall be telling this with a sigh

“I should have called it

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills.

Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it—not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend.

Freud was once asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably expected a complicated answer. But Freud, in the curt way of his old days, is reported to have said: “Lieben und arbeiten” (to love and to work).

Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. . . . Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.

[ Remark on the occasion of his seventieth birthday :] The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. . . . What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. . . . It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime—and a cruelty, too.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

The poor ego . . . serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. . . . Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego, and the id.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

The ego’s relation to the id might be compared with that of a rider to his horse. The horse supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go.

Before the problem of the artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.

The ego is not master in its own house.

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction: after all, the sexual life of adult women is a “dark continent” for psychology.

The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual; the position of the genitals— inter urinas et faeces —remains the decisive and unchangeable factor. One might say here, varying a well-known saying of the great Napoleon: “Anatomy is destiny.”

The individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form.

I owe my results to a new method of psychoanalysis, Josef Breuer’s exploratory procedure; it is a little intricate, but irreplaceable, so fertile has it shown itself to be in throwing light upon the obscure unconscious mental processes.

I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, nor an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer . . . with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.

We have seen that hysterical symptoms immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which they were provoked and in arousing their accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. . . . Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.

I am inclined to suppose that children cannot find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they have been seduced previously. The foundation for a neurosis would accordingly always be laid in childhood by adults.

[ Responding to skepticism about the usefulness of the first balloon flights :] What good is a new-born baby?

[ After the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, when asked by a woman, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” :] A republic, if you can keep it.

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

The King of France’s Picture set with Four hundred and Eight Diamonds, I give to my Daughter Sarah Bache requesting however that she would not form any of those Diamonds into Ornaments either for herself or Daughters and thereby introduce or countenance the expensive vain and useless Fashion of wearing Jewels in this Country.

Painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have often and often in the course of the Session [ of the Constitutional Convention], and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that [sun painted] behind the [chair of the] President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.

That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.

The grand Leap of the Whale in that Chace up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed by all who have seen it, as one of the finest Spectacles in Nature!

I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. . . . The turkey . . . is a much more respectable bird.