Quotes for When You Need Peace · Page 165

Serene words to slow down your world and bring you back to stillness.

4104 quotes · Page 165 of 171

“I have sometimes thought that a squire and a vestry were a king and republic in miniature. The vestry is as tyrannic, in its way, as the squire in his.”

— Horace Walpole

“You think me ambitious: ambition, alas! is composed of more rugged materials. If I were ambitious, I should not for so many years have been a prey to all the hell of conscientious…”

— Horace Walpole

“Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.”

— Anthony Burgess

“The great gift of the southern lands to our civilisation is the simple right to sit at an outside cafe table and look at things.”

— Anthony Burgess

“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.”

— Anthony Burgess

“A mechanical description of the act tells us nothing, any more than a scientifically accurate account of mastication will convey the flavour of roast duck.”

— Anthony Burgess

“Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit…”

— David Hume

“It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving…”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“That great disaster is a symbol to us to remember the big things of life and to forget the small things. We have thought too much of the small things.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“Every little thing counts in a crisis and we want our weight felt and our voice heard in quarters which are for the avoidance of world conflict.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“But the past is dead and gone and our immortal civilisation does not help us greatly in solving the problems of today.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

“Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husks.”

— George MacDonald

“I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use.”

— George MacDonald

“It is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence.”

— George MacDonald

“In the midst of the disguises and artifices that reign among men, it is only attention and vigilance that can save us from surprises.”

— Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

“But God laughs at the prayers we make to him to avert public misfortunes, when we do not oppose what is being done to bring them about.”

— Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

“Some always allege that excessive freedom ultimately destroys itself; while others fear on the contrary that authority, which by its nature always grows, will finally degenerate…”

— Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

“Let us not believe that our soul is a portion of the divine nature, as some philosophers have dreamed. God is not a whole that can be shared out.”

— Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

“The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe things because we want them to be so and not because we have seen them for what they are.”

— Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

“The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip To haud the wretch in order; But where ye feel your honour grip, Let that aye be your border.”

— Robert Burns

“Life is all a variorum, We regard not how it goes; Let them cant about decorum, Who have characters to lose.”

— Robert Burns

“It's guid to be merry and wise, It's guid to be honest and true, It's guid to support Caledonia's cause And bide by the buff and the blue.”

— Robert Burns

“A good life is a main argument.”

— Ben Jonson

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