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 never give advice unless someone asks me for it. One thing I’ve learned, and possibly the only advice I have to give, is to not be that person giving out unsolicited advice based on your own personal experience.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Error is acceptable as long as we are young; but one must not drag it along into old age.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

If I am judged for my work, many myths about me as an autocrat or otherwise would become clearer. I feel false propaganda will not last, and truth will ultimately prevail.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

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

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

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

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

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

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

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

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

I’m grateful to intelligent people. That doesn’t mean educated. That doesn’t mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call ‚mother wit‘ means intelligence that you had in your mother’s womb. That’s what you rely on. You know what’s right to do.

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

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.