Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

There is no education like adversity.

The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.

A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special...

What signifies knowing the names, if you know not the nature of things?

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

A student is not a container you have to fill, but a torch you have to light up.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.

You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.

They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic. A man’s own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it continues the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling.

If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.

Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature; it is our future that lays down the law of our today.

Keep your attention focused entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours.

There is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living.

In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

He that hunts others, must run himself.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

In life, all good things come hard, but wisdom is the hardest to come by.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

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

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live accordingly to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.