Quotes to inspire and reflect

As generations come and go, / Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; / Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, / And feeble, of themselves, decay.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever / From creation to decay, / Like the bubbles on a river / Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream / is man, no more.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon / Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, / Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, / Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

Our lives ... are but a little while, / so let them run as sweetly as you can, / and give no thought to grief from day to day. / For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, / but hurries on its business, and is gone.

Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full / Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

Ambition is a meteor-gleam; / Fame a restless airy dream; / Pleasures, insects on the wing / Round Peace, th’ tend’rest flow’r of spring.

Calm's not life’s crown, though calm is well.

Tranquillity! thou better name /(Than all the family of Fame.

A man can seldom—very, very, seldom—fight a winning fight against his training: the odds are too heavy.

There’s so much horseshit about babies; schools change every ten years. [My sister] raised a couple of nice ones by forcing them to be considerate or leave the room.... I think people act the way they’re expected to act.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.

I suspect tragedy in the American countryside because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty.

A tragedy means always a man’s struggle with that which is stronger than man.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress.

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.

The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives; the greater, again, in proportion thereto, the outward restlessness, the confused flux of mankind, the polyphony of strivings.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

Tradition, thou art for suckling children, / Thou art the enlivening milk for babes, / But no meat for men is in thee.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

They that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new.

I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.

I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us.

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions.

We go right enough, darling, if we go wrong together!

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.

Fuller’s cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

For thy sake, tobacco, I / Would do anything but die.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

A man of no conversation should smoke.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.

To each thing belongs / its measure. Occasion is best to know.

In season, all is good.