Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
All great ideas are dangerous.
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To its own impulse every creature stirs; / Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!
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Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
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An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.
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If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn’t help; best to let it lie there.
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The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable.
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Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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General and abstract ideas are the source of the greatest errors of mankind.
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One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
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Great ideas are not charitable.
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Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
7
Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of 1 hought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead.
4
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
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It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.
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It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren.
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The idealist is incorrigible: if he be thrown out of his Heaven, he makes himself a suitable ideal out of Hell.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man.
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If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.
4
Don’t use that foreign word “ideals.” We have that excellent native word “lies.”
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These, if ever, are the brave free days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up presently in the old places.
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When smashing monuments, save the pedestals— they always come in handy.
7
He who lives more lives than one / More deaths than one must die.
5
That character in conversation which commonly passes for agreeable is made up of civility and falsehood.
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Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.
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The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.
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Spread yourself upon his bosom publicly, whose heart you would eat in private.
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In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays.
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Often a noble face hides filthy ways.
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It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.
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The hater of property and of government takes care to have his warranty deed recorded; and the book written against fame and learning has the author’s name on the title-page.
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Occident, n. The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It is largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful subtribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call “war" and “commerce.” These, also, are the principal industries of the Orient.
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It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.
4
Many among men are they who set high / the show of honor, yet break justice.
7
Hunger can explain many acts. It can be said that all vile acts are done to satisfy hunger.
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Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn’t important enough to me to be an obsession.
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If people are hungry, ill-clad, unsheltered or diseased, nothing is so important as to remedy their condition.
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No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.
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All’s good in a famine.
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There’s no sauce in the world like hunger.
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Pleasantry is never good on serious points, because it always regards subjects in that point of view in which it is not the purpose to consider them.
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Appetite, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.
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The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they’ve been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy.
7
“Do you serve women at this bar?” “No,” says the barman, “you’ve got to bring your own.”
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Gentle Dulness ever loves a joke.
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A truly comic, invented world must live at the sanie time as the world voe live in.
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A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
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Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism.
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