Quotes to inspire and reflect

[ Of his loss of the sight of one eye, 1735 :] Now I will have less distraction.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

[ Of Thomas More :] Omnium horarum hominem .

The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

[ Of Abraham Lincoln :] His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

[ Responding to Rufus Choate’s characterization of the Declaration of Independence as “glittering and sounding generalities” :] “Glittering generalities!” They are blazing ubiquities.

In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. [Daniel] Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,

Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.

The less government we have the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided power.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no rime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; . . . that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

A man may love a paradox without either losing his wit or his honesty.

Never strike a king unless you are sure you shall kill him.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord’s power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

But do your thing, and I shall know you.

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history; only biography.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Almost all people descend to meet.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

La Terre est Bleue Comme une Orange .

’Tis a queer life, and the only humor proper to it seems quiet astonishment. Others laugh, weep, sell, or proselyte. I admire.

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies,

I am an invisible man. . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

[ On The Waste Land:] Various critics have done me the honor to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

A condition of complete simplicity

Consumed by either fire or fire.

We only live, only suspire

First, the cold friction of expiring sense

In the uncertain hour before the morning

Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

Who are only undefeated

Music heard so deeply