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.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

I consider wisdom supernatural because it isn’t taught by men – it’s a gift from God.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

What you put into life is what you get out of it.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

We’re in the last days, man – I truly, in my heart, believe that. It’s written. I could go on with biblical situations and things my grandma told me. But it’s about being at peace with myself and making good with the people around me.

Lost time is never found again.

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Knowledge is power.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

God has already done everything He’s going to do. The ball is now in your court. If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.

If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

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

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

Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.

God has his plans and his reasons. Sometimes we are supposed to go through things so that we learn lessons.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

Nature is not human hearted.

A shady business never yields a sunny life.

Thrift is of great revenue.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

The cautious seldom err.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.