Quotes to inspire and reflect

No man alive can say, This shall not happen to me.

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?—to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began.

Nothing has happened to you unless you make much of it.

Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

The burnt child, urged by rankling ire, / Can hardly wait to get back at the fire.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

From their own experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

Experience, travel— / These are an education in themselves.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

In the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Policy sits above conscience.

In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.

Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of s aints.

a certain / alloy of expediency improves the / gold of morality and makes / it wear all tbe longer.

Oft expectation fails and most oft there / Where most it promises, and oft it hits / Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

Even if it is to be, what end do you serve by running to meet distress?

Lighten grief with hopes of a brighter morrow; / Temper joy, in fear of a change of fortune.

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

Being is the great explainer.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery: our life.

Every life is its own excuse for being.

As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.

Some men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

People’s sympathies seem generally to be with the fire so long as no one is in danger of being burned.

What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do it.

Its just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.

Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.

The heart of man does not tolerqte an absence of the excellent and supreme.

The best of things, beyond their measure, cloy.

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

We need someone, I say, on whom our character may mould itself: you’ll never make the crooked straight without a ruler.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one’s knowledge or one’s taste.

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

Darwinian Man, though well-behaved, / At best is only a monkey shaved!