“And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.”

A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.

Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

My weapon is literature.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.

No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’

If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?

Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

Now one of the changes that must come to Africa is the idea of limited rule, I mean in term of how long one leader can stay in power. The era of president for life is not gone yet but it is on its way out and that is one of the problems with Mugabe and others.

An angry man is always a stupid man.

Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists.

I also take it as granted that every created thing, and consequently the created monad also, is subject to change, and indeed that this change is continual in each one.

How could science be an enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?

There is no other subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance… Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles, but never to persons.

God’s relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.

It was astonishing that for some considerable distance around the mould growth the staphococcal colonies were undergoing lysis. What had formerly been a well-grown colony was now a faint shadow of its former self…I was sufficiently interested to pursue the subject.

Divine Law is not subject nor affected by the majority vote of humanity

Domestic happiness is the end of almost all our pursuits, and the common reward of all our pains. When men find themselves forever barred from this delightful fruition, they are lost to all industry, and grow careless of all their worldly affairs. Thus they become bad subjects, bad relations, bad friends, and bad men.