Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.
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.
The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.
It's almost impossible that an argument would naturally form the kind of arch that it does in 'Lifespan'. So, the conversation is constructed.
Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels.
The talent of turning men into ridicule, and exposing to laughter those one converses with, is the qualification of little ungenerous tempers.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.
The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.
Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world is due to the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it.
We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy, then a sorrow, now a sin, then a generous or brave action.
The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.
Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.
Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand.
I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
the tea-hour is the hour of peace ... strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle - a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.
No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.
One puts into one's art what one has not been capable of putting into one's existence. It is because he was unhappy that God created the world.
It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.
In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.
The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.
The literary gift is a mere accident - is as often bestowed on idiots who have nothing to say worth hearing as it is denied to strenuous sages.
Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.
When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and the purity of its heart.
Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.
Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.
Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers.
The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.
We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions.
It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all.
Though love repine, and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply,- "'Tis man's perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die."
The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done.
How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!
You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.
Novelty serves us for a kind of refreshment, and takes off from that satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary entertainments.