Life and Learning quotes and sayings

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

To achieve, you need thought. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought, but never so well expressed.

Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.

Passions are the gales of life.

Charm strikes the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Two purposes in human nature rule. Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favor of the belief which he finds in himself.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Three passions simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

The reward of suffering is experience.

Time as he grows old teaches all things.

His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.

Wisdom comes alone through suffering.

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

People often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.

Plodding wins the race.

Little by little does the trick.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

A man sits with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems shorter than a minute. But tell that same man to sit on a hot stove for a minute, it is longer than any hour. That's relativity.

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.

Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

Don't find fault, find a remedy.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

The object of living is work, experience, and happiness. There is joy in work. All that money can do is buy us someone else's work in exchange for our own. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.

Laziness may appear attractive but work gives satisfaction.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.

Soft words are hard arguments.

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

The education of a man is never complete until he dies.

As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of more.

A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.