The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

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

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.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

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

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

Black men don’t like to be called ‚boys,‘ but women accept being called ‚girls.‘

There is no such thing as Something for nothing.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

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

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.