Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

He who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

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.‘

The more I see the less I know for sure.

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

What one fool can understand, another can.

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

When befriended, remember it; when you befriend, forget it.

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

The less you know, the more you believe.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

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.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.