The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

We are wiser than we know.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

To tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

Rashness belongs to youth; prudence to old age.

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

I’ve just always been a reader.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

I read poetry to save time.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

Here’s what I’ve learned about deal-breakers. If you have enough natural chemistry with someone, you overlook every single thing that you said would break the deal.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Regarding life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is worthless.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

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

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.