Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Civilization is not inherited it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.
Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.
[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.
[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy.
In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.
[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.
There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.
For what is philosophy but an art – one more attempt to give “significant form” to the chaos of experience?
[R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man.
Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.
[W]orship, if not the child, is at leastthe brother, of fear.
…but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.
We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.
A man is as old as his arteries and as young as his ideas.
We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit
If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say “Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history
but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.
Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.
[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.
Grow strong, my comrade … that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more.
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
The individual succumbs but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
Sixty years ago I knew everything now I know nothing education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.