Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don’t mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

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.

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

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

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

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

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act.

Jesters do often prove prophets.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

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

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

There’s nothing you can know that isn’t known.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

I am a little too absorbed by science to be able to philosophise much; but the more I look into myself, the more I find myself possessed by the conviction that it is only the science of Christ running through all things, that is to say true mystical science, that really matters. I let myself get caught up in the game when I geologise.

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