Unused Inspirational Quotes

Thus is the nature of love: that you must use it! A love unused is not love! If it is something that sits on the shelf that you don't know what to do with, it is not true to the nature of love! Use love!

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties…Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform. (unused 1949 prefatory note to The Recognitions)

A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other.

Let the challenge of your ambitions, of your aspirations, rouse your slumbering and often unused powers into action.

Fear grid-irons your broken, suffering heart with strength, encasing it with a protective, tough shell. One that soon becomes a prison that will emaciate the unused, enclosed heart inside if left to its own accord. But renewed hope gently unwraps the hard cast, and replaces it with a more resilient, pliable layer, protective, strong, but permeable so as to let love soak in and nurture the malnourished, dying heart inside.

I’d read Persuasion, about Anne Elliot, who, unmarried at twenty-seven, veers perilously close to an economically and socially unmoored fate before being saved from the indignity of spinsterhood by Captain Wentworth. I’d read about Hester Prynne and Miss Havisham and Edith Wharton’s maddening, doomed Lily Bart. These were not inspiring portraits. Collectively, they suggested that women who remained unmarried, whether by choice or by accident, were destined to wear red letters or spend their lives dancing in unused wedding dresses or overdose on chloral hydrate. These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have.

Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. Thus, while it takes Soviet Russia a vast amount of time and hard work to produce one inspired lunatic like Lysenko, the West can so arrange things that even the dullest farmer can see it makes more sense to burn his grain, melt his butter and wash away the remains of his pulped vegetables with his tanks of unused wine than it does to actually sell the stuff to be consumed.

I want to become the favorite song of my own uprising. I want to see the most forgotten, unused part of my soul the one which for years I kept closed out of spite, find the courage to go up to my mind and start writing liberation slogans across its highest fences.

Remember, inspiration unused is merely entertainment. To get new results, you need to take new actions.

The person who is practising frequent Confession must be specially watchful about neglected duties (even if, often, they are only little things), about neglected inspirations and graces, about opportunities to do good left unused, about time wasted, about failure to show charity to the neighbour. He must excite himself to a deep and sincere contrition for these omissions and to a firm resolve to strive earnestly against even the smallest sins of omission that are in any way deliberate.

Let me do this my way? Why do you do it this way if it’s not working? It is convenient, and it has a history of ancient glory attached to it? But it’s present, and it’s not working presently. Don’t enlighten me. People are doing it this since the time dead sea was only sick. Imagine - a sword hanging on your neck to change the approach, what will be the first thing that will come to your mind? A prayer that the sword is broken, not –sharp enough or the sword-holder suffers a heart-attack. But you won’t agree to change your approach? No, work is anyway tough and to make it tougher by attempting something I am unused to, is double the work and I can’t do the work of two people. Who are these two people? One is me and my approach & another is you sitting in my head and making me work the way you desire. But I am merely requesting you to change the way you work? It might yield better results. Why should I? This is the way it’s done since the time dead sea was only sick and I don’t wish to insult the tradition.

Litter by Maisie Aletha Smikle You want me not Am inedible left to rot Am unusable to you And treasure to someone new Am litter Don't use me for batter Or to make fried fritter Am just matter that doesn’t matter Rejected unwanted misplaced I have a place It's no disgrace However where am placed is a disgrace On the beach in the market or on the street Where you meet to play shop and eat I should be out of sight In a bin anchored tight Or some where Where I can rest in piece And not be tossed about from place to place Littering everywhere like heaps of fallen snow I can be recycled too And use to make things brand new Bury burn or reuse just choose Don't misuse or abuse And dump me where I don't belong Left for the winds and rain to take me along Wherever it goes Like am your foe Treat Earth kindly Place me in a bin where I belong Even litter has a place It's no disgrace