Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

It’s overwhelmingly in the self-interest of the United States of America to have a secure, democratic friend, a strategic partner like Israel.

If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

No man was ever wise by chance.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

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

If you would judge, understand.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

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.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

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.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.