The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy – the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.
It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.
Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
Anger is a prelude to courage.
The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else – we are the busiest people in the world.
Death has but one terror, that it has no tomorrow.
To be fully alive is to feel that everything is possible.
Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.
The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome.
No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart.
Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.
What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.
The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.