Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge, so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.
12
The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.
5
The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
6
Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honor than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life.
6
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
7
Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
6
“Good taste” is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.
7
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
6
All of life is a dispute over taste and tasting.
6
Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
8
A person’s taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
7
Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.
9
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever, or amiable.
7
The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.
7
Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
6
Be equal to your talent, not your age. / At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.
8
I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money.
7
Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred.
10
Behind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist quite often—a very remarkable man.
7
What a man is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases—when he stops showing what he can do.
7
Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent, / which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.
12
There is no so wretched and coarse a soul wherein some particular faculty is not seen to shine.
6
Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.
7
A forte always makes a foible.
4
Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
7
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
5
No one is so accursed by fate, / No one so utterly desolate, / But some heart, though unknown, / Responds unto his own.
10
Wisdom must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child—on a field-mouse instead of a human soul.
9
Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.
4
Search not a wound too deep lest thou make a new one.
5
A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.
4
Unto a broken heart / No other one may go / Without the high prerogative / Itself hath suffered too.
9
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
7
Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.
12
Whether science—and indeed civilization in general—can long survive depends upon psychology, that is to say, it depends upon what human beings desire.
8
It isn’t important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.
14
Unfamiliarity lends weight to misfortune,'and there was never a man whose grief was not heightened by surprise.
6
Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.
13
A man surprised is half beaten.
4
Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.
7
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
3
The superstition in which we grew up, / Though we may recognize it, does not lose / Its power over us.—Not all are free / Who make mock of their chains.
5
In all superstition wise men follow fools.
10
All people have their blind side—their superstitions.
7
The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
9
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
5
The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt.
5
we parted each feeling / superior to the other / and is not that / feeling after all one of the great / desiderata of social intercourse.
7