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.

Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

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

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

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.

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

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

The more you know the less you need to say.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

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

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

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

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

If you look at space companies, they’ve failed either because they’ve had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

A company shouldn’t get addicted to being shiny, because shiny doesn’t last.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

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

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

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

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

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

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

I did this book ‚Harvest for Hope,‘ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

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 interested in movement, and I’m interested in money, and I’m interested in the movement of money.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

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.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.