Quotes to inspire and reflect

There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.

Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

The wily lunatic is lost if through the narrowest crack he allows a sane eye to peer into his locked universe and thus profane it.

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.

One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.

That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, / Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent, and instinctive; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers life would become a mere syllogism, and hence too metallic to be borne.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

A single lie destroys a whole reputation for integrity.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, hut is a stab at the health of human society.

He saw she was lying but it was a brave lie. They talked from their hearts—with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.

A falsehood is, in one sense, a dead thing; but too often it moves about, galvanized by self-will, and pushes the living out of their seats.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

And, after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but / The truth in masquerade; and I defy / Historians—heroes— lawyers—priests, to put / A fact without some leaven of a lie.

A lie faces God and shrinks from man.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It’s for the superfluous we sweat.

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

They must know but little of mankind who can imagine that, after they have been once seduced by luxury, they can ever renounce it.

Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we all run in debt.

Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches.

Of all affliction taught a lover yet, / ’Tis sure the hardest science to forget.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

When a love relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves.

The lover is made happier by his love than the object of his affection.

There is desire / in those who love to hear about their loved ones’ pains.

Everything disturbs an absent lover.

Lovers are commonly industrious to make themselves uneasy.

Hatred which is entirely conquered by love passes into love, and love on that account is greater than if it had not been preceded by hatred.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

After all, my erstwhile dear, / My no longer cherished, / Need we say it was no love, / Just because it perished?

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourself are dying.

Women’s hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

It is obviously quite difficult to be no longer loved when we are still in love, but it is incomparably more painful to be loved when we ourselves no longer love.

[L]ove was an appalling bore once you had ceased loving. All that time wasted.

You must love him, ere to you / He will seem worthy of your love.

We must try to love one another.... The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating.