The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Real living is living for others.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

I don’t think that faith, whatever you’re being faithful about, really can be scientifically explained. And I don’t want to explain this whole life business through truth, science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

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

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Forever is composed of nows.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

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.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

Many admire, few know.

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

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

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

I don’t have a problem with Hulk Hogan. People say things and do things, and who am I to judge?

To be is to do.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.