"Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another."
"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
"Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason."
"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object."
"Try not to become a person of success, rather try to become a person of value."
"What is an idea? It’s an image that paints itself in my brain. So all your ideas are images? Assuredly; for the most abstract ideas are the consequences of all the objects I’ve perceived."
"The free man is a warrior. How is freedom measured among individuals, among peoples? According to the resistance that must be overcome, according to the trouble it takes to stay on top. The highest type of free man must be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps away from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude."
"Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile."
"It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves."
"Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it is an enemy."
"It does not matter how many books you have, but how good the books are which you have."
"To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life regardless of its contents."
"The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God."
"Everyman's life lies within the present, for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain."
"Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself."
"One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human."
"No sane man will dance."
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem."
"I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow."
"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep."
"No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he."
"Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."
"Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."
"It is a misfortune for a woman never to be loved, but it is a humiliation to be loved no more."
"What then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be an equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal, who had warned his victim"
"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."
"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other."
"The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun."
"The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper."
"Science is organised knowledge."
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
"Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value."
"There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain."
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you."
"Courage is almost always a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."
"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind."
"Brother, the Great Spirit has made us all."
"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment."
"A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known."
"A man is a little soul carrying around a courpse."
"What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee."
"The first who was king was a fortunate soldier: Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors."
"Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness."
"Marcus Aurelius"
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep."
"They say in India that a man who is liberated in this world has to cultivate a few mild bad habits in order to stay in the body, because if he were absolutely perfect he would disappear from manifestation. So the yogi, the great yogi, occasionally smokes a cigarette or has a bad temper occasionally, something that keeps him human, and that little thing is very important."