The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

To be social is to be forgiving.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It’s experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

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

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

No one but a fool is always right.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

I am not the first Buddha who came upon Earth, nor shall I be the last. In due time, another Buddha will arise in the world – a Holy One, a supremely enlightened One, endowed with wisdom in conduct, auspicious, knowing the universe, an incomparable leader of men, a master of angels and mortals.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

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

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Our best thoughts come from others.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.