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

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

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

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

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Know what you are talking about.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.