The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

After many years of great mercy, after tasting of the powers of the world to come, we still are so weak, so foolish; but, oh! when we get away from self to God, there all is truth and purity and holiness, and our heart finds peace, wisdom, completeness, delight, joy, victory.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

It is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

I never admire another’s fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.