Quotes to inspire and reflect

The window to the world can be covered by a newspaper.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Do not, oh do not indulge such a wild idea that a newspaper might err! If so what have we to trust in this age of sham?

Give to a gracious message / An host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell / Themselves when they be felt.

Someday, before we all die, perhaps I shall get from home a letter in which all the news will be pleasant. 1 never have thus far.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

Nowadays truth is the greatest news.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert’s unhappiness.

The “sensibility” claimed by neurotics is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention in themselves.

We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it: poor creatures that we are!

Each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval—a thing which, to the general run of the race, is more dreaded than wounds and death.

Your next-door neighbour ... is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

Want gave tongue, and, at her howl, / Sin awakened with a growl.

No living being is held by anything so strongly as by its own needs. Whatever therefore appears a hindrance to these, be it brother, or father, or child, or mistress, or friend, is hated, abhorred, execrated.

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature.

The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Against necessity, / against its strength, no one can fight and win.

How base a thing it is / when a man will struggle with necessity! / We have to die.

It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.

I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.

We can never have enough of nature.

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wildness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against, it.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.

Man is embedded in nature.

True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.

In nature two things do not occur—the wheel and good taste.

Nature’s instructions are always slow, those of men are generally premature.

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

Those honour Nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything, even on theology.

'Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.

God, I can push the grass apart / And lay my finger on Thy heart!

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

The child of civilization, remote from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity.

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.

The visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of creation that a rational creature who will but seriously reflect on them cannot miss the discovery of a diety.

The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements—death.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature—yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.