I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to evaluate his life by a conscious endeavor.

Ignorance never settle a question.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

The charges we bring against others often come home to ourselves; we inveigh against our faults which are as much ours as theirs; and so our eloquence ends by tellings against ourselves.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

He who has so little knowledge of human natures as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

A problem well-put is half-solved.

What is a man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

You must try to observe yourself more and more objectively, to look at everything in yourself as though another person.

At the end of the day, we can endure more than we think we can.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Factual evidence can never “prove” a hypothesis; it can only fail to disprove it, which is what we generally mean when we say, somewhat inexactly, that the hypothesis is “confirmed” by experience.