Quotes to inspire and reflect

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.

The impulses of an incontinent man carry him in the opposite direction from that towards which he was aiming.

A good mind possesses a kingdom.

It’s not a man’s great frame / Or breadth of shoulders makes his manhood count: / A man 01 sense has always the advantage.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man’s inner destiny sets it.

What men, in their egotism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubberstamps, which constitute the chief mental equipment of the average male.

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.

One good head is better than a hundred strong hands.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

We pay / a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.

A superior man may be made to go to the well, but he cannot be made to go down into it. He may be imposed upon, but he cannot be fooled.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B.F. Skinner.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

Ironically, rock and roll, or whatever you want to call what the hysterical disc jockeys play, is very much in vogue now among intellectuals in New York and Paris and London.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

When faith is lost, when honor dies, / The man is dead.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Honor is like a steep island without a shore: one cannot return once one is outside.

A man who permits his honor to be taken, permits his life to be taken.

Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.

When the praying does no good, insurance does help.

’Tis said that persons living on annuities /Are longer lived than others.

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Wise and prudent men—intelligent conservatives—have long known that in a changing world wor

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or an idea, but is really some stronger material force.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall iiito institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

The test of political institutions is the condition of the country whose future they regulate.

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

I do not remember—that is the point—the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

Commonsense is the wick of the candle.

O, what men dare do! what men may do! what men daily do, not knowing what they do!

But we, we have no sense of direction; impetus / Is all we have; we do not proceed, we only / Roll down the mountain, / Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many / Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

What can we take on trust / in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness, / pride—nothing is secure, nothing keeps.