Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

I can’t deal with someone wanting to take a relationship backward or needing space or cheating on you. It’s a conscious thing; it’s a common-sense thing.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

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

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

What is common sense isn’t common practice.

Do not rebuke mockers, or they will hate you; rebuke the wise, and they will love you.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

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

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

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

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

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

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

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

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

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

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

I’m married. My wife, Stella – a beautiful woman. She’s brought a lot of peace to my life, a lot of wisdom.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

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

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

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

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

I used to read five psalms every day – that teaches me how to get along with God. Then I read a chapter of Proverbs every day and that teaches me how to get along with my fellow man.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.