By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

There is no wealth but life.

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

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

Common sense is not so common.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‚Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.‘

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

As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

All men are equal before fish.

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

Life is wasted on the living.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

The well bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

We cannot wish for that we know not.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

There are many things that I don’t understand.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.

Non-violence is the article of faith.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.