Quotes to inspire and reflect

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

What is an obstacle in our loving men is the love they have for themselves, which is touchy, exclusive, inordinate, tragic. We could never love them as much as that.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste- souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.

That which probably hears more stupidities than anything else in the world is a painting in a museum.

Take love when love is given, / But never think to find it / A sure escape from sorrow / Or a complete repose.

O, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

We must resemble each other a little in order to understand each other, but we must be a little different to love each other.

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.

It’s a burden to us even to be human beings—men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.

A child shows gratitude the way a woman/Shows she likes a pretty dress—/Puts it on and takes it off again—

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

There is no idea, no fact, which could not be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light.

Spend all you have for loveliness, / Buy it and never count the cost; / For one white singing hour of peace / Count many a year of strife well lost, / And for a breath of ecstasy / Give all you have been, or could be.

Only the flow matters: live and let live, love and let love.

 

It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Fun is like life insurance: The older you get, the more it costs.

“Each man’s soul is his genius.”

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom...Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.

Nothing is as irritating as the fellow who chats pleasantly while he's overcharging you.

It ain't a bad plan to keep still occasionally, even when you know what you're talking about.

A good front is half the battle in love or war.

Why love if losing hurts so much we love to know that we are not alone.

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children have taken off the shelf.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself...

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

 

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

 

The treacherous are ever distrustful. J. R. R.

 

Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. J. R. R.

 

The greater man the greater courtesy.

Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.

His honour rooted in dishonor stood, and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.