Quotes to inspire and reflect

Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so change of studies a dull brain.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

Make your friends your teachers and mingle the pleasures of conversation with the advantages of instruction.

Learn as though you would never be able to master it; hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it.

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.

To learn is a natural pleasure, not confined to philosophers, but common to all men.

Never believe on faith, / see for yourself! / What you yourself don't learn / you don't know.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

We cannot all be masters, nor all masters / Cannot be truly followed.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, “I was beaten.” He does not say, “My men were beaten.” Thus speaks a real man.

The leader, mingling with the vulgar host, / Is in the common mass of matter lost.

If you command wisely you’ll be obeyed cheerfully.

There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.

Men are of no importance. What counts is who commands.

The superior man is easy to serve and difficult to please.

The man who commands efficiently must have obeyed others in the past, and the man who obeys dutifully is worthy of being some day a commander.

It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.

Don’t yield to that alluring witch, Laziness, or else be prepared to surrender all that you have won in your better moments.

Flee laziness, which, while it produces an immediate delight, ends in the sorrow of repentance. And know that nature without exercise is a see 1 shut up in the pod, and art without practice is nothing.

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Let all the laws be clear, uniform, and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calligraphically bewigged.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.

Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.

Our nation is founded on the principle that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.

The people should fight for their law as for their city wall.

Every new time will give its law.

The more laws, the more offenders.

Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.

Give a wise man an honest brief to plead / and his eloquence is no remarkable achievement.

A just cause needs no interpreting. / It carries its own case. But the unjust argument / since it is sick, needs clever medicine.

People say law but they mean wealth.

Anyone who takes it upon himself, on his private authority, to break a bad law, thereby authorizes everyone else to break the good ones.

Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own' portrait.

All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.

Laws that only threaten, and are not kept, become like the log that was given to the frogs to be their king, which they feared at first, but soon scorned and trampled on.

Litigant, n. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.

A legal broom’s a moral chimney-sweeper, / And that’s the reason he himself s so dirty.