Quotes to inspire and reflect

Good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.

Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.

We laugh and laugh. Then cry and cry— / Then feebler laugh, Then die.

Wrong must not win by technicalities.

The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

We are in the world to laugh. In purgatory or in hell we shall no longer be able to do so. And in heaven it would not be proper.

In laughter all that is evil comes together, but is pronounced holy and absolved by its own bliss.

Not by warth does one loll but by laughter.

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

He who laughs best to-day, will also laugh last.

A laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer.

You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humour teaches tolerance.

Pain is deeper than all thought; laughter is higher than all pain.

Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.

If one were required to increase the dramatic seriousness of his face in relation to the seriousness of the problems he had to confront, he would quickly petrify and become his own statue.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

A human being should beware how he laughs, for then he shows all his faults.

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish.

[W]hile the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

[0]f all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

Battered wowien is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.

It begins to look, more and more disturbingly, as if the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from all the rest of life.

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

Language lies outside of society because it is its foundation; but it also lies within society because that is the only place where it exists and the only place where it develops.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.

Language,—human language,—after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,—sometimes not so adequate.

Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.

Language is the archives of history.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

To a teacher of language there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

I am still of the opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind—sex and the dead.

I don’t know nothing, I think. And glad of it.

So much has already been written about everything that you can’t find out anything about it.

The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.