“When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.”

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.

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

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don’t know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.

The greatest weapons in the conquest of knowledge are an understanding mind and the inexorable curiosity that drives it on.

Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.

A man’s real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.

It all begins with forgiveness, because to heal the world, we first have to heal ourselves.

We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin.

In this life ain’t no happy endings. Only pure beginnings followed by years of sinning and fake repentance.

If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.

The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else, but keep heart, it will turn out all right.