Quotes to inspire

Welcome to The UofH quotes page! The UofH will add to and expand the quotations in its arsenal. We hope visitors will find them stimulating and thought-provoking. Quotes cover topics such as arts, ethics, law, philosophy, religion and the sciences.

Submissions and suggestions for new quotes can be sent to The UofH Webmaster via the Contact page.

Arts

Every artist was first an amateur.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Creativity takes courage.
—Henri Matisse

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
—Pablo Picasso

A picture is a poem without words.
—Horace

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
—Ansel Adams

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.
—Edgar Degas

Ethics

No law is good unless it is morally good.

What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
—Cicero

Honesty has no fence against superior cunning.
—Jonathan Swift

Finance

[Credit is a system whereby] a person who can’t pay, gets another person who can’t pay, to guarantee that he can pay.
—Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1885-7)

Law

What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero

If you must break the law, do it to seize power: in all other cases observe it.
—Julius Caesar

[The judge], in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complainants to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case.
—George H. Painter, CFTC

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
—Honore de Balzac

It is legal because I wish it.
—Louis XIV

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
—Cardinal Richelieu

Philosophy

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
—Albert Einstein

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we possess virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
—Aristotle

He whose deeds exceed his wisdom, his wisdom shall endure; but he whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, his wisdom will not endure.
—Chanina Ben-Dosa (in the Mishnah)

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.
—G. K. Chesterton

Religion

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
—Albert Einstein

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.
—Buddha

Sciences

Theories are nets: only he who casts will catch.
—Novalis

In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
—T. S. Eliot