Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

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

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

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.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

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

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

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

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

I look forward to a great future for America – a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

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.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

Mysticism is the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.

Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom: the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I’m honest enough to say I don’t know everything. You know, I don’t. I don’t understand all of God. I don’t understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

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

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.