Quotes to inspire and reflect

My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky: / So was it when my life began; / So is it now I am a man; / So be it when I shall grow old, / Or let me die!

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Rain is good for vegetables, and for the animals who eat those vegetables, and for the animals who eat those animals.

It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days. There were periods of drizzle during which everyone put on his full dress and a convalescent look to celebrate the clearing, but people soon grew accustomed to interpret the pauses as a sign of redoubled rain.

The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.

The radio is now something people listen to while they are doing something else.

You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

We need our radicals.

Segregation is on its deathbed—the question now is, how costly will the segregationists make the funeral?

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving, it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

Everybody should take each other as they are, white, black, Indians, Creole. Then there would be no prejudice, nations would get along.

Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.

The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

Though old the thought and oft exprest, / ’Tis his at last who says it best.

It is in disputes as in armies, where the weaker side sets up false lights, and makes a great noise, to make the enemy believe them more numerous and strong than they really are.

The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor, causes a war between princes.

Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding.

When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.

Looking at God instantly reduces our disposition to dissent from our brother.

Little quarrels often prove / To be but new recruits of love.

The soul that has no established aim loses itself.

The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning, the main aim of his life.

Whoso doth no evil is apt to suspect none.

Purity / Is obscurity.

When he has no lust, no hatred, / A man walks safely among the things of lust and hatred

The sun, though it passes through dirty places, yet remains as pure as before.

The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.

Puritanism had fallen into such disrepair that not even the oldest spinster thought of putting Susanna in a ducking stool; not even the oldest farmer suspected that Susanna’s diabolical beauty had made his cow run dry.

There is no land of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages, as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of Punning.

It is far more ignominious to die by justice than by an unjust sedition.

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

The compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned.

The first of all laws is to respect the laws: the severity of penalties is only a vain resource, invented by little minds in order to substitute terror for that respect which they have no means of obtaining.

He only may chastise who loves.

The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious enough to wear a grin on my face.

I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate.

Many a man spanks his / children for / things his own / father should have / spanked out of him.

Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem.

Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my “sentence” without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

[Wjhatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements.

Television wrecked the short-story branch of the industry, and now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on someone’s first novel is good money down a rat hole.

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.

A presentation copy, reader,—if haply you are yet innocent of such favours—is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.