Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

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.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

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

The wisest have the most authority.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

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.

Nature abhors annihilation.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

Philosophy is the highest music.

There was something undifferentiated and yet complete, which existed before Heaven and Earth. Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger. It may be considered the mother of the universe. I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

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

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

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

Of life’s two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer’s hand.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

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