Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

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

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

Oh! Most miserable wretch that I am! Why have I not learnt how to swim?

Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.

There’s place and means for every man alive.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten or a hundred or even a thousand! It’s the profound result when two or more respectful human beings determine to go beyond their preconceived ideas to meet a great challenge.

I have lived long enough both in years and in accomplishments.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

With a tree, all the growth takes place at the growing tips. Humanity is exactly the same. All the growth takes place in the growing tip: among that one percent of the population. It’s made up of pioneers, the beginners. That’s where the action is.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

It is natural to die as to be born.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

A fool is wise in his eyes.

A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

I’m going to be so much better a president for having been at the CIA that you’re not going to believe it.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

You know, nothing is more important than education, because nowhere are our stakes higher; our future depends on the quality of education of our children today.

It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

In football, it’s the job of the player to play, the coach to coach, the official to officiate. Each guy is charged with upholding his end, nothing more. In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

As unique as we all are, an awful lot of us want the same things. We want to shake up our current less-than-fulfilling lives. We want to be happier, more loving, forgiving and connected with the people around us.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything – ‚Marathon‘ or ‚All Money‘ or ‚Crenshaw‘ – and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.