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