Quotes to inspire and reflect

[Jesus], a man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Jealousy’s a proof of love, / But ’tis a weak and unavailing medicine; / It puts out the disease and makes it show, / But has no power to cure.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in consequence.

too many creatures / both insects and humans / estimate their own value / by the amount of minor irritation / they are able to cause / to greater personalities than themselves.

A word and a stone let go cannot be called back.

To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations.

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages—leaf after leaf—never re-turning one.

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

Life finds its wealth by the claims of the world, and its worth by the claims of love.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.

Better be left by twenty dears / Than lie in a loveless bed; / Better a loaf that’s wet with tears, / Than cold, unsalted bread.

My trade and art is to live,.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

The moment one is on the side of life “peace and security” drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.

Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law.

Life without absorbing occupation is hell—joy consists in forgetting life.

Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand / When we with daisies lie, / That commerce will continue, / And trades as briskly fly.

On Wall Street, he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that...Masters of the Universe. There was...no limit whatsoever!

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.

After the meal, the couple retired to their bedroom. Man and wife don’t usually lie together in the daytime, but when he went outside to close the shutters, she did not protest. As soon as he put his arm around her she was aroused, like all adolescent— since a woman who has not been pregnant, remains virginal forever.

They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house.

Intimacy begins with oneself. It does no good to try to find intimacy with friends, lovers and family if you are starting out from alienation and division within yourself.

When married people don’t get on they can separate, but if they’re not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says: “Yes; the little ones does."

The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.

In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron of B-52s.

Countries do not assume burdens because it is fair, only because it is necessary.

World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

An ally need not own the land he helps.

We shall be judged more by what we do at home than what we preach abroad.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

Every man’s affairs, however little, are important to himself.

Intemperance is the plague of sensuality, and temperance is not its bane but its seasoning.

Since the creation of the world there has been no tyrant like Intemperance, and no slaves so cruelly treated as his.