His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even… knowledge, was foolproof.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

What by a straight path cannot be reached by crooked ways is never won.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he’s going to get sick on it.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

Teaching’s hard! You need different skills: positive reinforcement, keeping students from getting bored, commanding their attention in a certain way.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Don’t throw stones at your neighbors if your own windows are glass.

You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

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

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

I never had a speech from my father ‚this is what you must do or shouldn’t do‘ but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn’t perfect.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Information is not knowledge.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

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

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

Women have to be active listeners and interrupters – but when you interrupt, you have to know what you are talking about.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.