The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours – and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

We should take care not to make the intellect our goal; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

When it comes to everybody else’s thing and their lane and their timing, I’m never doing anything intentional to, like, come after somebody. That will always be my biggest mistake or anybody’s biggest mistake if that’s their intention.

Real life is the life that’s in you, not your circumstances, like where you live or what job you have or who you’re in relationship with.

Don’t let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn’t go with it.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

It’s different from being 21 and you think there’s endless amount of opportunities. At 33, the ending is much, much closer.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

My name is not unfamiliar to anybody in the dance community. I’m talking the upper echelon of dance studios.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

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

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

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

When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.

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.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Vanity is but the surface.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.