Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Every man is his own hell.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

I’m crepuscular.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

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

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

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

And yet it moves.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

I think Himalayan climbers tend to mature fairly late. I think most of the successful Himalayan climbers have ranged from 28 to just over 40, really.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

I have an existential map. It has ‚You are here‘ written all over it.

No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

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.

Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That’s when you know the most, you’ve seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

I think I’ve got wiser.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Don’t swap horses in crossing a stream.

Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

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.