It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

It’s sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

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.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

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.

A fool is wise in his eyes.

I sent one e-mail in my life. I sent it to Jeff Raikes at Microsoft, and it ended up in court in Minneapolis, so I am one for one.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

Without tact you can learn nothing.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

I have an urge to communicate. I think I’m a change from what it would be like dating a normal guy who doesn’t talk too much.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.

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.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.

In honorable dealing you should consider what you intended, not what you said or thought.

Never speak to an invalid from behind, nor from the door, nor from any distance from him, nor when he is doing anything. The official politeness of servants in these things is so grateful to invalids, that many prefer, without knowing why, having none but servants about them.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.

No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

The only way I hear gossip is if it’s big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it’s, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.