“They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate. depend upon books.”

We didn’t used to think that having several of these little risk factors were a big deal. But it is. These little risk factors add up in a way that is worse for you than one big risk factor.

The true antidote to greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether you obtain the object of your desire or not. Either way, you are still content.

Meditating means bringing the mind back to something again and again. Thus, we all meditate, but unless we direct it in some way, we meditate on ourselves and on our own problems, reinforcing our self-clinging.

A decision of the courts decided that the game of golf may be played on a Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.

Occasionally we sigh for an earlier day when we could just look at the stars without worrying whether they were theirs or ours.

By the time you’re eighty years old you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it.

Experience is something I always think I have until I get more of it.

Journalism, like history, has no therapeutic value; it is better able to diagnose than to cure, and it provides society with a primitive means of psychoanalysis that allows the patient to judge the distance between fantasy and reality.

When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.

Discipline means protection from one’s own wanton interest.

The United States grants the favors of the second, third, or fifty-seventh chance, and its citizens remain free to invent for themselves whatever character draws a crowd or pays the rent.

Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime.

Some idea of inflation comes from seeing a youngster get his first job at a salary you dreamed of as the culmination of your career.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions.

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

As surely as you are a living man, so surely did that spectral anatomy visit my room again last night, grin in my face, and walk away with my trousers: nor was I able to spring from my bed, or break the chain which seemed to bind me to my pillow.

Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.

Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.

I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.

I believe that if you took privacy and you said, I’m willing to give up all of my privacy to be secure. So you weighted it as a zero.

I do feel it’s hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I’m trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.

The chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don’t, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.