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

In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

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

You can always tell when a man’s well informed. His views are pretty much like your own.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn’t they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

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

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.

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.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

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

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

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

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

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

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

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Whatever is well said by another, is mine.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

I think we’re doing a dreadful job of educating.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

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

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

Start with God – the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.

Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.