Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is medicine, not scenery, for which a sick man must go searching.

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years’ time.

The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.

What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.

For prying into any human affairs, none are equal to those whom it does not concern.

When the journey from means to end is not too long, the means themselves are enjoyed if the end is ardently desired.

Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

The proverbist knows nothing of the two sides of a question. He knows only the roundness of answers.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

When we rejoice in our fullness, then we can part with our fruits with joy.

The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.

’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, / And after one hour more twill be eleven; / And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, / And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; / And thereby hangs a tale.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was upon me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.

Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

How do you know that the fruit is ripe? Simply because it leaves the branch.

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak; / Who do not drink their tea, though they always said / Tea was such a comfort.

A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that’s subtraction.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Mathematicians who are only mathematicians have exact minds, provided all things are explained to them by means of definitions and axioms; otherwise they are inaccurate and insufferable, for they are only right when the principles are quite clear.

Acquisition means life to miserable mortals.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.

As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men.

If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.

It is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs.

Our admiration is so given to dead martyrs that we have little time for living heroes.

To die in agony upon a cross / Does not create a martyr; he must first / Will his own execution.

The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

[T]he nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

[Married men] are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

Esther could not conceive. In every other way she was a good wife; she knew how to knit, sew a wedding gown, bake gingerbread and tarts, tear out the pip of a chicken, apply a cupping glass or leeches, even bleed a patient.

’Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight As, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.