All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

To be social is to be forgiving.

It is easy to dismiss the world as ‚irrelevant,‘ or consumed by ‚paranoid anti-Americanism,‘ but perhaps not wise.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

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

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

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.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

We as women, we have to understand that we know more, just even instinctively, than we think we do.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

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

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

We have but one permanent home: heaven – that’s still the old truth that we always have to re-learn – and it’s only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

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

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.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

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.

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

Now I am older, I understand we have to accept who we are.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‚Eureka!‘ but ‚That’s funny…‘

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

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.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.