“Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it’s fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.”

The Art of Flying is but newly invented, twill improve by degrees, and in time grow perfect; then we may fly as far as the Moon.

It is a great obstacle to happiness to expect too much.

There is nothing one sees oftener than the ridiculous and magnificent, such close neighbors that they touch.

To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.

It is high time for me to depart, for at my age I now begin to see things as they really are.

An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages.

Les vrais philosophes sont comme les e le phants, qui en marchant ne posent jamais le second pied a’ terre que le premier ne soit bien affermi. True philosophers are like elephants, who when walking never placetheir second footontheground untilthefirst is steady.

Nothing can be more destructive to ambition, and the passion for conquest, than the true system of astronomy. What a poor thing is even the whole globe in comparison of the infinite extent of nature!

Neatness is a crowning grace of womanhood.

Nature is never so admired as when she is understood.

Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.

I have lived one hundred years; and I die with the consolation of never having thrown the slightest ridicule upon the smallest virtue.

The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.” – Socrates (470-399 B.C.) “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.

No battle is ever won … victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

The best physician is also a philosopher.

It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.