Eminently quotable quotes
and inspirational quotations

  Our extensive Spiritual and Poetry insights quotations pages are FULL of examples of quotable quotes and inspirational quotations that surely demonstrate how such profound truths are recognised, and applauded, by a Spiritual-Poetical aspect that seems to be innate to Human Nature.

Disinterestedness

  Prayer that craves a particular commodity - anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.   It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Divine Edification

  Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness

William Wordsworth

  Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised

William Wordsworth

  One in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition.

William Wordsworth

  Truths that wake
To perish never

William Wordsworth

  The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose ... We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, ... between men of the world, who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, - is, that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class, from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance of such a teacher. ...

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call genius. ... But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like, and not less like other men. There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. ... For they are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes beholds again, and blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  The poets are thus liberating gods. ...
There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, -you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.
This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Relationships

  Without the smile from partial beauty won,
O what were man? - a world without a sun.

Thomas Campbell

  She is pretty to walk with,
And witty to talk with,
And pleasant, too, to think on.

Sir John Suckling

  Why man, she is mine own
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.

William Shakespeare

  Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

William Shakespeare

  The bashful virgin's sidelong looks of love,
The matron's glance that would those looks reprove.

William Shakespeare

  By my modesty, - the jewel in my dower - I would
not wish any companion in the world but you.

William Shakespeare

  Domestic happiness, thou only bliss
Of paradise that has surviv'd the fall!

William Cowper

  You are my true and honourable wife;
As dear to me as the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.

William Shakespeare

  Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations stone
As proofs of Holy Writ

William Shakespeare

  O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet fondly loves!

William Shakespeare

  For a light wife doth make a heavy husband.

William Shakespeare

  Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Alexander Pope

  A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall,
He shall not bind his soul with clay.

Alexander Pope

  No …. holy father, throw away that thought.
Believe not that the dribbling dart of love
Can pierce a complete bosom.

William Shakespeare

  Thrice blessed they that master so their blood,
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage:
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

William Shakespeare

Virtue v Respectability

  Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper, as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us 't were all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd
But to fine issues; nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor -
Both thanks and use.

William Shakespeare

A Contented Life

  The primal duties shine aloft, like stars;
The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless,
Are scattered at the feet of Man, like flowers.

William Wordsworth

  Live while you live, the epicure would say,
And seize the pleasures of the present day;
Live while you live the sacred preacher cries,
And give to God each moment as it flies.
Lord, in my views let both united be;
I live to pleasure when I live to thee.

Philip Dodderidge

  He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day;
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the midday sun.

John Milton

  Well may your hearts believe the truths I tell;
't is virtue makes the bliss where'er we dwell.

William Collins

  For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds,
And though a late, a sure reward succeeds.

William Congreve

  The soul's calm sunshine and heartfelt joy.

Alexander Pope

The Ancient Way

  I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

John Dryden

  Happy he who far from business persuits
Tills and re-tills his ancestral lands
With oxen of his own breeding
Having no slavish yoke about his neck.

Horace

  God made the country, and man made the town.

William Cowper

Human Existence

  Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee.

William Shakespeare

  If society fits you comfortably enough you call it liberty.

Robert Frost

  Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor, and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of the universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God.

Lord Acton

  Permit me... to tell You what the freedom is that I love and that to which I think that all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. As if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man and no body of Men and no Number of men can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of Liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, ascertained by wise Laws. And secured by well constructed institutions.

Edmund Burke

  The co-existence of several nations under the same State is a test, as well as the best security, of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation; and, as such, it is in the natural and providential order, and indicates a state of greater advancement than the national unity which is the ideal of modern Liberalism. The greatest adversary of the rights of nationality is the modern (i.e. July 1862) theory of nationality. By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, it reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary. It cannot admit them to an equality with the ruling nation which constitutes the State because the State would then cease to be national, which would be a contradiction of the principle of its existence. According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilisation in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are eliminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.
If we take the establishment of liberty for the realisation of moral duties to be the end of civil society, we must conclude that those States are substantially the most perfect which ... include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them.

Lord Acton

  Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern ...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Lord Acton

  Reason and Knowledge have always played a secondary, subordinate, auxiliary role in the life of peoples, and this will always be the case. A people is shaped and driven forward by an entirely different kind of force, one which commands and coerces them and the origin of which is obscure and inexplicable despite the reality of its presence.

Fyodor Dostoyevski

  One cannot avoid a certain feeling of disgust, when one observes the actions of man displayed on the great stage of the world. Wisdom is manifested by individuals here and there; but the web of human history as a whole appears to be woven from folly and childish vanity, often, too, from puerile wickedness and love of destruction: with the result that at the end one is puzzled to know what idea to form of our species which prides itself so much on its advantages.

Immanuel Kant

  Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Immanuel Kant (as transliterated by Isaiah Berlin)

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