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

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

Women have to be active listeners and interrupters – but when you interrupt, you have to know what you are talking about.

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

There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that… There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.

When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.

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

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

I wear a hat on stage so that people won’t be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don’t wear a hat, there’s no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

Last year we said, ‚Things can’t go on like this‘, and they didn’t, they got worse.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

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

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

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

OK, so what’s the speed of dark?

Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.