The last suit that you wear, you don’t need any pockets.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.

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

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

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

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

I think that there is never an indispensable leader, you know? I think that there is a time with dignity that one needs to leave.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

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

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

I do believe in the old saying, ‚What does not kill you makes you stronger.‘ Our experiences, good and bad, make us who we are. By overcoming difficulties, we gain strength and maturity.

We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.

He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

If you wished to be loved, love.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

Beauty and folly are old companions.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

What you put into life is what you get out of it.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.