Quotes to inspire and reflect

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on the long winter evenings.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? . . . You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.

The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot [depicted in a painting] might be pregnant with revolution!

[ Remark to Ambroise Vollard :] Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!

I see several Africas and one vertical in the tumultuous event with its screens and nodules, a little separated, but within the century, like a heart in reserve.

My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedoms of those freedoms which break down in the prison-cell of despair.

[ Of impending death :] One foot already in the stirrup.

[ Don Quixote’s epitaph :] To die in wisdom, having lived in folly.

Dos linajes solos hay en el mundo . . . que son el tener y el no tener .

Digo, paciencia y barajar .

We cannot all be friars, and many are the ways by which God leads his own to eternal life.

He’s a muddle-headed fool, with frequent lucid intervals.

El Caballero de la Triste Figura .

To tilt against windmills.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I won’t try to recall, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen, who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old shield, a lean horse, and a greyhound for coursing.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Her secret? It is every artist’s secret . . . passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate!

[Marriage] is the tomb of love.

I am fond of children (except boys).

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream.

Life, what is it but a dream?

“O oysters,” said the Carpenter.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

But four young oysters hurried up,

The sun was shining on the sea,

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!” “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

Who can tell whether the parallelogram, which in our ignorance we have defined and drawn, and the whole of whose properties we profess to know, may not be all the while panting for exterior angles, sympathetic with the interior, or sullenly repining at the fact that it cannot be inscribed in a circle?

You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

“Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning . . . but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.

“I only took the regular course.” “What was that?” inquired Alice. “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

[ The Queen of Hearts speaking :] Off with her head!

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. “I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.” “You mean you can’t take less ,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”

Why is a raven like a writing-desk?

[ Of the Cheshire Cat :] “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.

Speak roughly to your little boy,

You’re enough to try the patience of an oyster!

Oh my fur and whiskers!

[ The White Rabbit speaking :] Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

Down the Rabbit-Hole.

[ Commenting on Margaret Fuller’s remark, “I accept the universe,” ca. 1843 :] Gad! she’d better.

[Economics is] not a “gay science,” I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate, and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one: what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science .

All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.