Quotes to inspire and reflect

Minds differ still more than faces.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.

Mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

The mind is the expression of the soul, which belongs to God and must be let alone by government.

The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.

The mind is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not discreetly how to use it.

We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.

Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, / To lead those false who trust it.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

If the mind, which rules the body, ever forgets itself so far as to trample upon its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury; but will rise and smite its oppressor.

[J]ust make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly falls away.

What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

[A]t three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and lulls, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way to achievement.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

The army is a nation within the nation; it is a vice of our time.

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.

You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies.

It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands.

He who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart.

Raw in the fields the rude militia swarms, / Mouth without hands; maintained at vast expense, / In peace a charge, in war a weak defence.

The provincial, the middle-class, the bourgeois, are to be found everywhere; they are necessary, I suppose—only, when you differ from their own narrow molds, they may try to crucify you.

[The bourgeois] prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.

I call bourgeois anyone who says no to himself, who gives up struggle and renounces love in favor of his security. I call bourgeois anyone who places anything above feeling.

The blush that flies at seventeen / Is fixed at forty-nine.

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering.

After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

[TJhough we are perpetually bragging of it [the middle class] as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper class.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone—but never hustled.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.

The quality of mercy is not strained; / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed—/ It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.

The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.

A man who has no office to go to—I don’t care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception.

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.

The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.

There was, I think, never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.

There’s nothing like mixing with woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

Male, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.

Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.

If a woman wants to hold a man, she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him. We make gods of men, and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful.