But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

There are many things that I don’t understand.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.

Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

We will explore the mysteries of science and harness the power of technology and innovation. We will realise the opportunities of the digital world. Our youth will learn more from – and with – each other.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

You learn to know a pilot in a storm.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

It’s not a real adventure when you have to pay for it.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.