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

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

But Satan now is wiser than of yore, and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

Everything isn’t political.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

By the time I was 23 years old, I had multiple arrests.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo 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.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

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.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

The cautious seldom err.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

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.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

A lie cannot live.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.