Wisdom

If we look upon the earth as a place where our 'higher selves' have come to learn, to experience, or even to be judged, then the splitting of realities that occurs with the many-worlds interpretation is merely an extension of these functions.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old seek what they sought.

Education is a journey of the mind to kindle the fire of imagination.

Do you know which is the greatest epic till date?

Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time. - Henry David Thoreau.

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don't understand.

You speak of the good conduct of your ancestors. As your own conduct is under discussion, and not theirs, I cannot see how their former good character can at all serve your present purpose. Fortunately for our country, every man stands upon his own merit.

Silent words are heard through eyes.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

The question is not why should we change but rather what sort of death wish are we promoting by refusing to change?

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

Sometimes, that’s the way it is with people. You think you can tell what they are based on the patterns that you see, but when you take a look inside, they’re nothing like you expect them to be.

Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.

It is as true as anything else which can be spoken to say that all knowledge is really available everywhere.