You show me someone who can’t understand people and I’ll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself.
One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason.
There is no merit to discipline under ideal circumstances. I must have it in the face of death or it is worthless.
In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.
It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.
Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women’s breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?
Suppose we were to teach creationism. What would be the content of the teaching? Merely that a creator formed the universe and all species of life ready-made? Nothing more? No details?
Custom is second nature. Be accustomed to a bald head, sufficiently accustomed, and hair on it would seem monstrous.
Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.
If we only obey those rules that we think are just and reasonable, then no rule will stand, for there is no rule that some will not think is unjust and unreasonable.
What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind’s habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes.
I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.
When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
It is almost impossible to think of something no one has thought of before, but it is always possible to add different frills.
Dreams may be impossible, yet still be dreamed.
The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own “national security” to be paramount above all other consideration.
Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.
There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.
It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?
It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind.