Quotes to inspire and reflect

Home is where you come to when you have nothing better to do.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life.

There is scarcely any less bother in the running of a family than in that of an entire state. And domestic business is no less importunate for being less important.

Such is the patriot’s boast, where’er we roam,

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

The Stately Homes of England,

And when a lady’s in the case, You know all other things give place.

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared … to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free of them there.

[ Gollum speaking of the Ring :] Where iss it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!

 

[ Remark after he was defeated in the presidentialelection :] A funny thing happened to me on theway to the White House.

 

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

 

The Oklahoma Ligno and Lithograph Co Weeps at a nude by Michael Angelo.

 

There are only two great diseases in the world today—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.

 

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

 

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

 

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.

 

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Charles Babbage’s calculating machine] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

 

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

 

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

 

Per caputque pedesque .

 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

[ Of Ronald Reagan :] For seven and a half years I have worked alongside him and I am proud to be his partner. We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex.

 

He’s [Heathcliff’s] more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

 

Nelly, I am Heathcliff.

 

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

 

All children, except one, grow up.

 

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

The wit we wish we had spoils the wit we have.

A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be.

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.