To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

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.

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.

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

The most crucial use of knowledge and education is to understand the importance of developing a good heart.

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.

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

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

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.

A leader who does not take advice is not a leader.

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.

Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.

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 hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.