Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.
8
In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
10
We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition sine qua non of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing.
8
Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
7
Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.
8
Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?
7
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
6
Grieve not, because thou understandest not life’s mystery; behind the veil is concealed many a delight.
3
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
6
All is riddle, and the key to a. riddle is another riddle.
5
O! many a shaft, at random sent / Finds mark the archer little meant!
4
Tis very puzzling on the brink / Of what is called Eternity to stare, / And know no more of what is here, than there.
7
I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.
7
The universe forces those who live in it to understand it.
13
The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it.
9
To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
7
The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
6
The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe.
6
The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.
5
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
6
I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.
5
Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but Intelligence.
5
Horror causes men to clench their fists, and in horror men join together.
8
The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
6
Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.
7
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.
4
A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.
7
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.
5
Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.
19
Our instrument and our hope is the United Nations, and I see little merit in the impatience of those who would abandon this imperfect world instrument because they dislike our imperfect world.
6
Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
11
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.
6
Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
8
Strange how few, / After all's said and done, the things that are / Of moment.
7
Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
6
If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
5
Our aches and pains conform to opinion. A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.
6
Is anyone in all the world / Safe from unhappiness?
7
Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.
10
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
4
I have discovered that all man’s unhappiness derives from only one source—not being able to sit quietly in a room.
7
Life is a well of joy; but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks, which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned.
7
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
9
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.
12
The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be superadded.
5
True melancholy breeds your perfect, fine wit, sir.
7
Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.
11
For fate has wove the thread of life with pain, / And twins ev’n from the birth are misery and man!
11