Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‚security,‘ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.

When I look back on my life as a whole, it is impossible for me not to feel blessed.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

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

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

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

You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.

Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

In ‚Changeling,‘ I tried to show something you’d never see nowadays – a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.