Quotes on Ifs

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;_x000D_ _x000D_ And if I die no soul will pity me:_x000D_ _x000D_ And wherefore should they, since that I myself_x000D_ _x000D_ Find in myself no pity to myself?

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal.

Every patriot believes his country better than any other country . . . In its active manifestation-it is fond of killing-patriotism would be well enough if it were simply defensive, but it is also aggressive . . . Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part . . . Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.

All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.

If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me Napoleonic in its grandeur.

What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

Against the vast majority of my countrymen, even at this moment, in the name of humanity and civilization, I protest against our share in the destruction of Germany. A month ago Europe was a peaceful comity of nations; if an Englishman killed a German, he was hanged. Now, if an Englishman kills a German, or if a German kills an Englishman, he is a patriot, who has deserved well of his country.

If your children want to alter society, listen to their reasons and the idealism behind them. Don't crush them with some clever remark straight away.

A man must believe in himself and his judgement if he expects to make a living at this game. That is why I don't believe in tips."

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

I've done everything I wanted to do, even if I have had to pay a very high price - which has been the case most of the time.

If we go to work at 8 a.m. and go home at 5 p.m., this is not a high-tech company and Alibaba will never be successful. If we have that kind of 8-5 spirit, then we should just go and do something else.

What can the schools do to defend democracy? Should they preach a specific political doctrine? I believe they should not. If they are able to teach young people to have a critical mind and a socially oriented attitude, they will have done all that is necessary.

If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.