It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‚The Tonight Show.‘ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?

Wisdom oft times consists of knowing what to do next.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

I’ve had some ‚riotous excursions of the human spirit‘ alongside the young Sailors and Marines, and it’s time to leave the stage to the young leaders who got their rank the old-fashioned way – they earned their stripes in combat.

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‚em, ‚Certainly I can!‘ Then get busy and find out how to do it.

No man was ever wise by chance.

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

God does not play dice.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate… The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.

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

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

When I did A Soldier’s Story, I was very young and green and thought I knew everything-now I know I know everything!

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God – but to create him.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘