There is only a finger’s difference between a wise man and a fool.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Falsehood is a perennial spring.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

No one but a fool is always right.

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.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

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

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The utmost extent of man’s knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.

An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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.

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

There is no gambling like politics.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

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

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

You’d have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I’d probably want to die in San Sebastian.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

You cannot step into the same river twice.

You might say that Lyndon Johnson is a cross between a Baptist preacher and a cowboy.

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

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

I consider wisdom supernatural because it isn’t taught by men – it’s a gift from God.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.