All quotes

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. … The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a…

Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.'

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. … Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only…

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. … Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed…

Any dogma, primarily based on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Human beings are very conservative in some ways and virtually never change numerical conventions once they grow used to them. They even come to mistake them for laws of nature.

If we only obey those rules that we think are just and reasonable, then no rule will stand, for there is no rule that some will not think is unjust and unreasonable.

It is its rules that hold society together and bind it into a whole. Is it such a light thing to disregard the rules for trivial reasons?

Superstition always directs action in the absence of knowledge.

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.

Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.

Anyone who displays a capacity for double-dealing must forever be suspected of being capable of displaying it again.

The observer influences the events he observes by the mere act of observing them or by being there to observe them.

The advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.

A person who expects the completely sophisticated and who guards against it is quite apt never to think of the primitive.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom.

Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery…

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being…

I am malicious because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me?

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had…

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his…

The moon, by her comparative proximity, and the constantly varying appearances produced by her several phases, has always occupied a considerable share of the attention of the inhabitants of the earth.

Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties…

There remains but the third class, the superstitious. These worthies were not content merely to rest in ignorance; they must know all about things which had no existence whatever.

They did to others that which they would not they should do to them — that grand principle of immorality upon which rests the whole art of war.

In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle which it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the…