Quotes to inspire and reflect

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

To make a vow for life is to make oneself a slave.

Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.

He that promises too much means nothing.

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.

Promises are not to be kept, if the keeping of them would prove harmful to those to whom you have made them.

Accursed from birth they be / Who seek to find monogamy, / Pursuing it from bed to bed— / I think they would be better dead.

We have our arts, the ancients had theirs.... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.

All progress means war with Society.

The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

The magnitude of a "progress" is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

Progress—progress is the dirtiest word in the language—who ever told us— / And made us believe it—that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always / A good idea?

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

There can be no progress if people have no faith in tomorrow.

The distance from nothing to a little, is ten thousand times more, than from it to the highest degree in this life.

The natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better.

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; / He who would search for pearls must dive below.

There’s no one so transparent as the person who thinks he’s devilish deep.

The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.

Violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort—they are reliefs of pain.

Not joy but joylessness is the mother of debauchery.

An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one’s life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

More men come to doom / through dirty profits than are kept by them.

It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunken. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Gain not base gains; base gains are the same as losses.

The smell of profit is clean / And sweet, whatever the source.

What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?

In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

I know not whether Laws be right, / Or whether Laws be wrong; / All that we know who lie in gaol / Is that the wall is strong; / And that each day is like a year, / A year whose days are long.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds / Bloom well in prison-air: / It is only what is good in Man / That wastes and withers there: / Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, / And the warder is Despair.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

Every prison that men build / Is built with bricks of shame, / And bound with bars lest Christ should see / How men their brothers maim.

It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes, / Tenets with books, and principles with times.

Ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions.

General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

Men of principle are sure to be bold, but those who are bold may not always be men of principle.

One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.

Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love.

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.