Quotes to inspire and reflect

To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first- rate.

Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence.

Be more than man, or thou’rt less than an ant.

Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep.

God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.

Anyone who has looked deeply into The world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men. The instinct that preserves them teaches them to be flighty, light, and false.

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

Every beauty, when out of its place, is a beauty no longer.

With our mortal minds we should seek from the gods that which becomes us.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

Send not for a hatchet to break open an egg with.

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

Is it sin / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?

Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp. / Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; /You might as well live.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.

No sane society chooses to commit national suicide.

Why dost thou complain of this world? It detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.

He who saves a man against his will as good as murders him.

If life’s a joke, then suicide’s a bad punch line.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward.

That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.

There is satiety in all things, in sleep, and love- making, / in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance.

Sufficiency’s enough for men of sense.

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, / And shares the nature of infinity.

Suffering is one very long moment. We can not divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods and chronicle their return.

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

Hearts live by being wounded.

The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

If pain could have cpred us we should long ago have been saved.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them.

We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon’s lancet than of twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight.

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt / A pain undiagnosable but felt.

Much of your pain is self-chosen. / It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.

A Wounded Deer—leaps highest.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by-the appalling total of human suffering; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to accept suffering as free, responsible men.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

Who, except the gods, / can live time through forever without any pain?