Science is nothing but perception.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

What one fool can understand, another can.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

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

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

We misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it, even if it’s an illusory sense of control.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

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.

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

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?

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you’re getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won’t have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect to find as we explore.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.