Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.
9
Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.
6
Life’s perhaps the only riddle / That we shrink from giving up.
7
Life’s a pudding full of plums.
6
All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
5
We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
6
Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.
14
Life is a short affair; / We should try to make it smooth, and free from strife.
7
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
6
Alas!—but why Alas? / It is the lot of mortality we experience.
6
Life only avails* not the having lived.
4
We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.
4
A minute to smile and an hour to weep in, / A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, / And never a laugh but the moans come double; / And that is life!
13
When I consider life, tis all a cheat. / Yet fooled with hope, men favour the deceit.
8
We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.
9
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.
8
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
8
There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told.
6
We mortals cross the ocean of this world / Each in his average cabin of a life; / The best’s not big, the worst yields elbowroom.
9
Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will get cut sooner or later.
9
I count life just a stuff /To try the soul s strength on.
10
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ / All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
9
Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.
8
Life is a toy made of glass; it appears to be of inestimable price, but in reality it is very cheap.
8
When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.
6
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
19
It must be admitted that liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
9
The true charter of liberty is independence, maintained by force.
5
Liberty plucks justice by the nose; / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum.
5
Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.
7
Liberty is the right to do what the laws permit.
12
People demand freedom only when they have no power.
9
Martyred many times must be / Who would keep his country free.
7
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.
5
Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
5
Liberation is not deliverance.
8
Liberty, n. One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.
6
The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
8
Those who are absent, by its means become present; it [mail] is the consolation of life.
8
A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest—at the command—of his head.
8
Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.
4
To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.
8
When a man’s busy, why leisure / Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: / ’Faith, and at leisure once is he? / Straightway he wants to be busy.
11
Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
4
A man, though wise, should never be ashamed / of learning more, and must unbend his mind.
8
Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free.
7
A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.
6
Trees and fields tell me nothing; men are my teachers.
21