Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

I know who I am, I know what I can and can’t do. I know what I will and won’t do. I know what I’m capable of and I don’t agree to do things that I don’t think I can pull off.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

The first two games for Churchill, I was so jittery that I didn’t know what to do. I was running more but didn’t know what to do. I’ve no bones accepting the fact that I didn’t know what was happening in the game.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

Don’t let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn’t go with it.

Now I am older, I understand we have to accept who we are.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

I think that there is never an indispensable leader, you know? I think that there is a time with dignity that one needs to leave.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

If I feel anxious every time someone is staring at me, well, I can’t control what they stare at, but my reaction is, I’m just not going to go outside the house. I’m going to stay in and chill. And when I do go out, I understand what comes along with that.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Only by joy and sorrow does a person know anything about themselves and their destiny. They learn what to do and what to avoid.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

One thing I’ve always loved about the culture at Microsoft is there is nobody who is tougher on us, in terms of what we need to learn and do better, than the people in the company itself. You can walk down these halls, and they’ll tell you, ‚We need to do usability better, push this or that frontier.‘

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

I think I have a dualistic nature.

Of those beings who live in ignorance, shut up and confined, as it were, in an egg, I have first broken the eggshell of ignorance and alone in the universe obtained the most exalted, universal Buddhahood.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.