Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

The art of being a slave is to rule one’s master.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.

The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.

Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom: the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

A lie cannot live.

From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

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.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

My company survives because I’ve learned to respect the ideas of people younger than me and recognize when my wisdom is obsolete.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.