The first requisite of science is to disprove your hypothesis.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it.

He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.

When an archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull's--eye is never the fault of the target. To improve your aim, improve yourself.

We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light.

To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.

There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.

I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

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

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.

Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

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.

I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.

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

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of human existence.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

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

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

The knowledge and skills you have achieved are meant to be forgotten so you can float comfortably in emptiness, without obstruction.

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.

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse.

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.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.