Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

I’m always worried about everything. Like spiders.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.

He who hath many friends hath none.

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

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

Wisely, and slow. They stumble that run fast.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‚You don’t know anything.‘ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.

I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

A word to the wise is infuriating.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

As long as the people don’t fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful… but so frightening.

It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

I learned a great many years ago that in a fight between husband and wife, a third party should never get between the woman’s skillet and the man’s ax-helve.

When you combine boring with fear, you have fun.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

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.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.

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

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

The worst men often give the best advice.

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

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

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

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.