Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as it was yesterday when you and I laid wreaths at the Garden of Remembrance.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

I keep working because I learn something new all the time.

The brain is wider than the sky.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

I’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

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.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

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

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

No one can outrun death. It will catch up to all of us eventually.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‚War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.‘

Nature abhors annihilation.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

Education is important because it prepares you for life.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.