It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Service of any type requires preparation.

We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

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

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Beauty and folly are old companions.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

This is Sunday, and the question arises, what’ll I start tomorrow?

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

You can never plan the future by the past.

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

Silence is the virtue of fools.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

I’ve never considered musical equipment very sacred.

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.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

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

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

If I don’t run for president, we’ll all be OK.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient.

The wisest have the most authority.

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.

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

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.