The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

Tomorrow, every Fault is to be amended; but that Tomorrow never comes.

What is my life if I am no longer useful to others.

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

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

Time discovers truth.

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

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

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.

I am not promising that God will give you everything you want. There are times when we want things that God knows would not be good for us.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

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

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, ‚I don’t have time.‘ But that’s the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

I believe that every one of us has a gift. And I believe that mine is the ability to take the complex and make it simple.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

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

My dad used to have an expression – ‚It is the lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they are about to do, and thinks it still matters.‘

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

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

The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Short cuts make long delays.

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

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.