wisdom

"Every man must be taken to be cognizant of the law, otherwise there is no saying to what extent the excuse of ignorance may not be Law carried. It would be urged in almost every case."

"As Christ compareth the understanding of scripture to a key, so compareth he it to a net, and unto leaven, and unto many other things for certain properties. I marvel, therefore, that they boast not t…"

"I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what …"

"You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery."

"I'm afraid to win, and afraid to lose; I hate a draw and can't stop competing; otherwise I'm fine."

"The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise."

"The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us."

"In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it,…"

"If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did."

"One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn’t despise them. One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings."

"The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought."

"As a student, in an hour when he was needing the help of sages, he followed Renan; Spinoza freed his mind in matters of religion; from afar came the brotherly greeting of Tolstoi."

"Lincoln had a wonderful faculty for understanding the topography of a country, and he was quite familiar with the one in which the army was about to operate; he carried a small chart in his pocket, on…"

"If we have a girl at home who has attained puberty, some one should come and ask for alliance. Otherwise the girl will have to remain a virgin only. But in a Brahmin’s house if there is a girl who has…"

"4833. The wise Man draws more Advantage from his Enemies, than a Fool from his Friends."

"Regarding the claims of Maunder and Sporer: "I started by trying to make it go away, mostly because of a prejudice about sun-weather relationships, and what I thought was true about the sun. In time I…"

"It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for wh…"

"We see only the script and not the paper on which the script is written. The paper is there, whether the script is on it or not. To those who look upon the script as real, you have to say that it is u…"

"When we are absorbed in other things, in the not-self, we forget the self. There is nothing unnatural about it. But, why forget the self through excess of attachment? Wisdom lies in never forgetting t…"

"There was such sanity in his voice; a politician’s sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb. This soulless certainty was more chilling than hysteria or malice."