I have many regrets, and I’m sure everyone does. The stupid things you do, you regret… if you have any sense, and if you don’t regret them, maybe you’re stupid.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

Maybe ‚loner‘ is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed being on my own.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

I think and that is all that I am.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

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.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

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

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

I’m almost like three people. There’s me the, Dolly, the person. There’s me, the star. And then there’s me, the manager.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Here’s what I’ve learned about deal-breakers. If you have enough natural chemistry with someone, you overlook every single thing that you said would break the deal.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

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.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

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

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

Remember, you can always stoop and pick up nothing.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

The method of instruction in Scouting is that of creating in the boy the desire to learn for himself.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

Since I was old enough to understand what a songwriter/producer is, I’ve had a curiosity about how Max Martin creates what he creates. I wanted to see that happen. I wanted to be there. I wanted to learn from him.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!