There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

The secret of life is not enjoyment but education through experience.

My alma mater was books, a good library.... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Science is a rising force, It is creating a new world about us. It needs to be watched and pressed into service, and in any case, it would be courting disaster to ignore it.