Quotes to inspire and reflect

With him for a sire and her for a dam, / What should I be but just what I am?

Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.

To work hard, to live hard, to diehard, and then to go to hell after all would be too damned hard.

Deep in the cavern of the infant’s breast / The father’s nature lurks, and lives anew.

For when will we civilized beings become really serious? said Kierkegaard. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days.

What is hell? Hell is oneself, / Hell is alone, the other figures in it / Merely projections.

Before the days of Kepler the heavens declared the glory of the Lord.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars—on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.

Overhead the sanctities of the stars shine forevermore,... pouring satire on the pompous business of the day which they close, and making the generations of men show slight and evanescent.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.

The heavens call to you, and circle around you, displaying to you their eternal splendours, and your eye gazes only to earth.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, / Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die, / Lift not your hands to It for help—for it / As impotently moves as you or I

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

Lleaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.

Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

The wish for healing has ever been the half of health.

It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

We are not sensible of the most perfect health, as we are of the least sickness.

Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out, not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also his life itself to obtain it.

Life is not living, but living in health.

Sickness is felt, but health not at all.

Enmity is catching.

The sense of wellbeing! It’s often with us / When we are young, but then it’s not noticed; / And by the time one has grown to consciousness / It comes less often.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

All men naturally hate one another. They employ lust as far as possible in the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretence and a false image of love; for at bottom it is only hate.

The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.

To put more faith in lies and hate / Than truth and love is the true atheism.

Hatred is so lasting and stubborn, that reconciliation on a sickbed certainly forebodes death.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

Even hatred of vileness / Distorts a man’s features.

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

Do nothing hastily but catching of fleas.

Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly.

It is indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one—keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

How much finer things are in composition than alone.

I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something.

Every man’s happiness is built on the unhappiness of another.

It is God’s giving if we laugh or weep.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.