We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Wonder is the mother of all science.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Man is a universe in little.

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

Leaders must understand that some people will inevitably sell out to the evil side. Don't waste your time wondering why; spend your time discovering who.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

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 truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.