Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.

Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.

Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.

There are in fact four very different stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it's more sanitary.

Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.

To think is to differ.

Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion- in the long run, these are the only people who count.

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

You've got to watch your mind all the time or you'll awaken and find a strange picture on your press.

A man without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe.

The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the "best possible" result in each separate instance.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember. - Aenid.