Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Some people take defeat and losses a certain way. You see how some fighters take losses.

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn’t an MP3.

But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

Life is our dictionary.

That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

My belief is that we were put into this world of wonders and beauty with a special ability to appreciate them, in some cases to have the fun of taking a hand in developing them, and also in being able to help other people instead of overreaching them and, through it all, to enjoy life – that is, to be happy.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.