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

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

Error is always more busy than truth.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Who is the wise man? He who sees what’s going to be born.

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

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

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

I spend a lot of time reading.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

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

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

Whatever is well said by another, is mine.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.