He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

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.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

I think sim racing helps. I have improved in areas and do it whenever I need to improve. You don’t feel G-force and those things are probably the biggest things, that and the fear factor which you feel when you drive. Therefore, when I go on to the track I’m better.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

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

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

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

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

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

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Our best thoughts come from others.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

If you wished to be loved, love.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

History should be written as philosophy.

Wise kings generally have wise counselors; and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

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.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

I still think like a Marxist in many ways.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Common sense is the genius of humanity.

Rashness belongs to youth; prudence to old age.

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

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.