Quotes to inspire and reflect

Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.

Men naturally despise those who court them, but respect those who do not give way to them.

Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when that faileth, he groweth out of use.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around, it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you.

Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.

Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.

Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.

To reign by opinion, begin by trampling it under your feet.

To observations which ourselves we make, / We grow more partial for th’ observer’s sake.

Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure.

One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.

In the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises.

It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform to other men’s opinions than to bring them over to ours.

An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.

So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

If all men saw the fair and wise the same / men would not have debaters’ double strife.

The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary is it that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally.

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell, / By reiteration chiefly.

Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!

Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.

If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

Nobody loves life like an old man.

Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

What [Time] hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

No one's so old that he mayn’t with decency hope for one more day.

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad foundations.

Old men grasp more at life than babies, and leave it with a much worse grace than young people. It is because all their labours having been for this life, they perceive at last their trouble lost.

Old men, for the most part, are like old chronicles that give you dull but true accounts of times past, and are worth knowing only on that score.

The old men know when an old man dies.

Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied with want of perception, ignorance, and a facility of being deceived. For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us?

Senescence begins / And middle age ends / The day your descendents / Out-number your friends.

Here’s a song was never sung: / Growing old is dying young.

Wiser in relish, if sedate, / Come graybeards to their roses late.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour / Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, / Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.

Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.