I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.

Being aware of a single shortcoming within yourself is far more useful than being aware of a thousand in someone else!

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 not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life. . . To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one’s life as possible is right to me.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Jealousy feeds upon suspicion, and it turns into fury or it ends as soon as we pass from suspicion to certainty.

For all men strive to grasp what they do not know, while none strive to grasp what they already know; and all strive to discredit what they do not excel in, while none strive to discredit what they do excel in. This is why there is chaos.

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious.

The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.

Life does not consist of facts. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.