What I call my ‚self‘ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people – and to hate those other people.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I – if I’m not interested in something, I don’t grasp it.

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

I didn’t go to university. Didn’t even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I add this, that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.

Non-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in man.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

Each one prays to God according to his own light.

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.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

Back when I was in school, few people understood dyslexia and what to do for it. My teachers thought I was lazy and not very clever, and I got bored easily… thinking of all the things I could do once I left school. I couldn’t always follow what was going on.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

The God who existed before any religion counts on you to make the oneness of the human family known and celebrated.

The bulk of the universities are about teaching kids.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.

Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.

We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.

Education levels the playing field, allowing everyone to compete.

When God sneezed, I didn’t know what to say.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could look forward to a whole world in which no child will be left behind?

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

Back in my days as a chemistry student, I used to be quite a technocrat. I was firmly convinced that scientists would have cornered God and photographed Him in color by 1951.

I believe in this concept that you learn by teaching.

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

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

Because of our sacred regard for each human intellect, we consider the obtaining of an education to be a religious responsibility.

If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it’s not religion, but you can train through education.

Education is important because it prepares you for life.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.