One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit.

Anywhere you go in the world is what you make of it, not what you read in books.

I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

The cure for pain is in the pain.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

He who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.