We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

You know more than you think you do.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

All that can be spelled out is without importance.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been.

The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old books.

An intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man almost nothing.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas—and you have to work through it all.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one’s own.

In fact, not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible…. [I]t seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible…

It is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast.

You could not step twice into the same river.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.

Remember happiness doesn’t depend on who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

Men and things rise, fall, move away, approach. Everything is a comedy of distances.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

[I] put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self—consciousness distinctly answered, “No!”

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.