I.B. George Quotes

What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?

Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.

All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.

It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent.

Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.

That sort of reputation which precedes performance [is] often the larger part of a man's fame.

Whatever be thy fate today, Remember, this will pass away!

They say fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit.

When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.

I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered.

The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

Folks as have no mind to be o' use have allays the luck to be out o' the road when there's anything to be done.

You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

It must be sad to outlive aught we love.

We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.

I've had my say out, and I shall be the' easier for't all my life. There's no pleasure i' living, if you're to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.

There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.

We mustn't be in a hurry to fix and choose our own lot; we must wait to be guided.

Religion, like all things, begins with self, And naught is known, until one knows himself.

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.

Thought Has joys apart, even in blackest woe, And seizing some fine thread of verity Knows momentary godhead.

Sweet Truth is a queen proud and mighty-- Her throne is in heaven above.

The higher life begins for us ... when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law.

Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.

In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.

A maggot must be born i' the rotten cheese to like it.

Even success needs its consolations.

Some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i' their own inside.

There are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest.

All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.

The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.

The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

Our consciences are not all of the same pattern.

When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.

Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .

Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.

Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.

A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.