The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Philosophy is the highest music.

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

Our best thoughts come from others.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

My heart aches for America and its deceived people.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

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.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

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

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

I have now exactly the same weight I had when I was 18, 20.

Wise kings generally have wise counselors; and he must be a wise man himself who is capable of distinguishing one.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

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.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

Education is the best provision for old age.

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

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

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.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.