You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.
Faith is the art of holding onto thing your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
Be weird, be random, be who you are because you never know who could love the person you hide.
Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
We should…be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.
There is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words.
Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to ‘educate the people’ so that they will have but one common mind to delude.
People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.
You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.
If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact.
Education, I am convinced, must be nothing more than this: The journey toward the limits of Reason, if any there be.
An education that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of all ages.
Once a man criticized my desire for knowledge by saying that it was not fitting for a woman to possess learning because there was so little of it. I replied that it was even less fitting for a man to possess ignorance because there was so much of it.
Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did.
The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.
Men who have slandered the opposite sex have usually known women who were cleverer and more virtuous than they are.
There Adam slept, and God formed the body of woman from one of his ribs, signifying that she should stand at his side as a companion and never lie at his feet like a slave, and also that he should love her as his own flesh.
If it were customary to send daughters to school like sons, and if they were then taught the natural sciences, they would learn as thoroughly and understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences as well as sons.
I considered myself most unfortunate because God had made me inhabit a female body in this world.
Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning.
Just as women’s bodies are softer than men’s, so their understanding is sharper.
If it has to be that wars and battles are begun for many reasons and quarrels, then they should also be avoided and shunned by better and more valid reasons.
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of great minds is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
In this age, the man who dares to think for himself and to act independently does a service to his race.
To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors.
The formation of habits is education and the education is the formation of habits.
The most common and the monstrous defect in the education of the day is that children fail to acquire the habit of reading.
The knowledge of God is the principal knowledge.
Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen.
We hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above.
The peculiar value of geography lies in its fitness to nourish the mind with ideas and furnish the imagination with pictures.
Of the joyous motives of our school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.
Having found the book which has a message for us, let us not be guilty of the folly of saying we have read it. We might as well say we have breakfasted as if breakfasting on one day should last us every day…
And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.
For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious.
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source spirituality.
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
The nitrogen in our DNA. The calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
The total number of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.
If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.
There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
