A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

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

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

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

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.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

A lie cannot live.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians – you are not like him.

His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even… knowledge, was foolproof.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

We are wiser than we know.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

The wise use of your freedom to make your own decisions is crucial to your spiritual growth, now and for eternity.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

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

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

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.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

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

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.