Quotes to inspire and reflect

An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.

Dreams are the subtle Dower / That make us rich an Hour—- / Then fling us poor / Out of the purple door.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.

There is something sad and terrifying about big families.

He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.

[T]he family in the West is finished.... its origin was economic, not biological.... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another’s jagged edges.

Sacred family!... The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.

One would be in less danger / From the wiles of the stranger / If one’s own kin and kith / Were more fun to be with.

The family the soul wants is a felt network of relationship, an evocation of a certain kind of interconnection that grounds, roots, and nestles.

When you deal with your brother, be pleasant, but get a witness.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

Natural affection is a prejudice: for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

The parents’ age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.

When brothers agfee, no fortress is so strong as their common life.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.

A guy at the bar, well-dressed, came up behind Cassius [Muhammad Ali] and touched him lightly at about the level of the sixth rib and went back to the bar and told his girl, “That’s Cassius Clay. I just touched him, no kidding."

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what is pleasing to them.

Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.

Unblemished let me live, or die unknown; / O grant an honest fame, or grant me none!

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

Fame’s carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

The dispersing and scattering our names into many mouths, we call making them more great.

We are more solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

There is no business in this world so troublesome as the pursuit of fame: life is over before you have hardly begun your work.

The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Men have a solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

VVe imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

All fame is dangerous: good bringeth envy; bad, shame.

Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.

How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public— like a Frog— / To tell your name—the livelong June—/To an admiring Bog!

Fame is a bee. / It has a song—/ It has a sting—/ Ah, too, it has a wing.

A man’s renown is like the hue of grass, / Which comes and goes.

Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.

Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn’t like to confront them with their own great themes.

If men of eminence are exposed to censure on one hand, they are as much liable to flattery on the other. If they receive reproaches which are not due to them, they likewise receive praises which they do not deserve.

Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding.

Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

Faith is, before all and above all, wishing God may exist.