words to inspire before you expire
“A man cannot always restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had himself planned for them. They will very often fall short of the magnitude to which his ambition has aspired. They will sometimes soar higher than his own imagination.”
—from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
“I hope the gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to groveling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth, without affecting any ornaments of learning or of style.”
—from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
“And what I now must tell has never been
Reported by a voice, inscribed by ink,
Never conceived by the imagination . . .”
—from Canto XIX of Dante’s Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
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