Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.
7
Never exceed your rights, and they will soon become unlimited.
8
He who is not a bird should not build his nest over abysses.
6
Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
12
When you have nothing to say, or to hide, there is no need to be prudent.
5
The eye of prudence may never shut.
4
Men almost universally have acknowledged a Providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
3
I know not where His islands lift /Their fronded palms in air; / I only know I cannot drift / Beyond His love and care.
10
The gods give to mortals not everything at the same time.
11
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
8
Know from the bounteous heaven all riches flow; / And what man gives, the gods by man bestow.
10
The man whom heaven helps / has friends enough.
10
How dark are all the ways of god to man!
9
The Infinite Goodness has such wide arms that it takes whatever turns to it.
12
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
4
To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.
7
In victory even the cowardly like to boast, while in adverse times even the brave are discredited.
8
Mankind apparently find it easier to drive away adversity than to retain prosperity.
8
One who was abhorred by all in prosperity is adored by all in adversity.
10
Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.
6
They merit more praise who know how to suffer misery than those who temper themselves in contentment.
11
The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.
12
Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
5
When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.
8
The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times.
7
Some men never find prosperity, / For all their voyaging, / While others find it with no voyaging.
9
Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.
6
If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
5
They who prosper take on airs of vanity.
7
Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these we must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.
5
Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it; reason forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it.
8
A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
14
Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.
10
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
3
What good is*a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?
9
I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.
6
The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength.
9
The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying “This is mine,’’ and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
6
No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.
7
It should be remembered that the foundation of the social contract is property; and its first condition, that every one should be maintained in the peaceful possession of what belongs to him.
6
Where there is no property there is no injustice.
8
What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
10
If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare.
4
Men honor property above all else; / it has the greatest power in human life.
11
It is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.
5
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift betwen the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
11
I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless; the poison is in the sugar.
7
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
9