When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

I think the word rich is all relative.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

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.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

Everything isn’t political.

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.

Youth is wasted on the young.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

Little things affect little minds.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.