Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

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

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

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

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

The more you know the less you need to say.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did… in fact, they admired it.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.

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!

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

The happiness and peace attained by those satisfied by the nectar of spiritual tranquillity is not attained by greedy persons restlessly moving here and there.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Time discovers truth.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.