Quotes to inspire and reflect

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

Life protracted is protracted woe.

’Tis very certain the desire of life / Prolongs it.

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earth- bound.

The most I ever did for you was to outlive you. / But that is much.

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many.

Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Whom the heart of man shuts out, / Sometimes the heart of God takes in, / And fences them all round about / With silence mid the world’s loud din.

It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything; otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously-—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature—“The sky is falling,” cried Henny- Penny, “and a piece of it fell on my tail.”

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and that often, paradoxically, is literature that suffers for it.

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story—or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall—is, “Is it dead or alive?”

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—the charm of women and the courage of men.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don t mind being that.

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

We cannot all hope tocombine the pleasing qualities of good looks, brains, and eloquence.

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for 1 never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward- the bars.

A good marksman may miss.

I am not eternity, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: “We must die," and seeks how to make us die well.

Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has.

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

You will die not because you're ill, but because ' you’re alive.

Death's stamp gives value to the coin of life; making it possible to buy with life what is truly precious.

The whole motley confusion of acts, omissions, regrets and hopes which is the life of each one of us finds in death, not meaning or explanation, but an end.

One must take all one’s life to learn how to live, and, what will perhaps make you winder more, one must take all one’s life to learn how to die.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

Dying is as natural as living.

Grieve not; though the journey of life be bitter, and the end unseen, there is no road which does not lead to an end.

A good life fears not life nor death.

The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.