Quotes to inspire and reflect

“There are strings,” said Mr. Tappertit, “. . . in the human heart that had better not be wibrated.”

She’s the ornament of her sex.

A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.

He has gone to the demnition bow-wows.

The unities, sir . . . are a completeness—a kind of universal dovetailedness with regard to place and time.

A demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body!

“C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, winder, a casement.” When the boy knows this out of the book, he goes and does it.

As she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would all be the same a hundred years hence.

[ Responding to being told that the law supposes a wife acts under a husband’s direction :] “If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, . . . “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law’s a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

Here’s richness!

I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.

“Hard,” replied the Dodger. “As Nails,” added Charley Bates.

Anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.

He avowed that among his intimate friends he was better known by the sobriquet of “The artful Dodger.”

They don’t mind it; it’s a regular holiday to them—all porter and skittles.

She knows wot’s wot, she does.

A good, contented, well-breakfasted juryman, is a capital thing to get hold of. Discontented or hungry jurymen, my dear Sir, always find for the plaintiff.

Oh Sammy, Sammy, vy worn’t there a alleybi!

“Eccentricities of genius, Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick.

Keep yourself to yourself.

Be wery careful o’ vidders all your life.

Dumb as a drum vith a hole in it, sir.

He had used the word [ humbug ] in its Pickwickian sense.

Battledore and shuttlecock’s a wery good game, vhen you an’t the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin’ to be pleasant.

The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society, but it is no community.

It is quite evident that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its three angles equal two right angles can be separated from the idea of a triangle, or than the idea of a mountain can be separated from the idea of a valley. Hence it is just as much of a contradiction to think of God (that is, a supremely perfect being) lacking existence (that is, lacking a perfection), as it is to think of a mountain without a valley.

But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something.

Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

While I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.

The first [rule] was never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgements than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it into doubt.

Do you know anyone who would—secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self— really prefer to return to childhood?

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space. . . . The atoms are unlimited in size and number, and they are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex, and thereby generate all composite things—fire, water, air, earth. For even these are conglomerations of given atoms.

[ Of Jean-Paul Sartre’s political agitation :] One does not arrest Voltaire.

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door.

Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?

[ Remark at funeral of his disabled daughter, 1948 :] Maintenant elle est comme les autres .

[ Responding to being compared to Robespierre :]

Vive le Québec! Vive le Québec libre! Vive le Canada français! Vive la France!

France cannot be France without greatness.

All my life, I have had a certain idea of France.

Faced by the bewilderment of my countrymen, by the disintegration of a government in thrall to the enemy, by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at the moment, of functioning, I General de Gaulle, a French soldier and military leader, realize that I now speak for France.

Since they whose duty it was to wield the sword of France have let it fall shattered to the ground, I have taken up the broken blade.

Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.

On ne naît pas femme, on le devient .

Why then should women be denied the benefits of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God almighty would never have given them capacities.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

She appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. . . . She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.