Western civilization has not yet learned the lesson that the energy we expend in ‘getting things done’ is less important than the moral strength it takes to decide what is worth doing and what is right to do.
The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.
Character is something you forge for yourself; temperament is something you are born with and can only slightly modify.
Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.
Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.
Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a “necessary evil”, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
Just about the only interruption we don’t object to is applause.
Real loneliness consists not in being alone, but in being with the wrong person, in the suffocating darkness of a room in which no deep communication is possible.
Between the semi-educated, who offer simplistic answers to complex questions, and the overeducated, who offer complicated answers to simple questions, it is a wonder that any questions get satisfactorily answered at all.
Take away grievances from some people and you remove their reasons for living; most of us are nourished by hope, but a considerable minority get psychic nutrition from their resentments, and would waste away purposelessly without them.
We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion.
Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.
If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you – out of love – takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.
We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure.
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
People who won’t help others in trouble “because they got into trouble through their own fault” would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not.
The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.