Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

Grace is indeed needed to turn a man into a saint; and he who doubts it does not know what a saint or a man is.

The happiest hour a sailor sees / Is when he’s down / At an inland town, / With his Nancy on his knees, yo ho! / And his arm around her waist!

I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint. But I shonuf ain’t no saint yet, nawsuh. v

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air- bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, / but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

Sacrifice may be a Bower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this Bower that virtue set forth on its travels.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country.

The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been

Where else, in a non-totalitarian country, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?

Sabbath, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Drown not thyself to save a drowning man.

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul—and that’s resignation.

Rumor goes forth at once, Rumor than whom / No other speedier evil thing exists; / She thrives by rapid movement, and acquires / Strength as she goes; small at the first from fear, / She presently uplifts herself aloft, / And stalks upon the ground and hides her head / Among the clouds.

Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, / The numbers of the feared.

Rumor is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures.

The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.

There is no useful rule without an exception.

In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.

Within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court.

If you have but a single ruler, you lie at the discretion of a master who has no reason to love you: and if you have several, you must bear at once their tyranny and their divisions.

The power of kings is founded on the reason and on the folly of the people, and specially on their folly.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

We owe subjection and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has respect unto their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only due to their virtue.

Whom hatred frights, / Let him not dream on sovereignty.

The subject’s love is the king’s best guard.

Princes are like heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration, but no rest.

Power educates the potentate.

If men think that a ruler is religious and has a reverence for the Gods, they are less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands.

Every ruler is harsh whose rule is new.

Spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing.

A man must have very eminent qualities to hold his own without being polite.

Royalty does good and is badly spoken of.

Folly often goes beyond her bounds>but impudence knows none.

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.

Is not this the true romantic feeling—not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?

Following each divorce, he discovered anew that unmarried a man had to take women places: out to restaurants, for walks in the park, to museums and the opera and the movies—not only had to go to the movies but afterwards had to discuss them.

It is not irregular hours or irregular diet that make the romantic life.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one you met when you were nineteen.

[Romance] was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.

Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not.

Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.