Wisdom

Wisdom is not making life any harder than it has to be.

Between the sands of time is a multitude of truths untold.

I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

Virtue comes by nature, learning, and practice, and thanks to virtue, all of the aforesaid may deserve approval.

You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others.

I hope people of the future will remember my books for being burned, and I challenge an elite few to imagine the embers of the last copy.

I prefer my justice to be blind.

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

Rumors run wild when one sacrifices for self and temporarily forsakes those who assume entitlement to one's persona.

I don't need anyone to rectify my existence. The most profound relationship we will ever have is the one with ourselves.

If you always read the same old ideas, what progress can you make in the name of discovering new paths?

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

Time is God’s given asset to humans.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.