Echoes

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants.

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.

The mind must be given relaxation — it will rise improved and sharper after a good rest. Just as we must not force fertile farmland, for uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigor.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers / Which of themselves our minds impress; / That we can feed this mind of ours / In a wise passiveness.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in. We too should so blend whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, that it may be all the clearer for being drawn from many sources; and then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience — both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.

Withdraw into yourself as much as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve.

Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

If thou desire to profit, read with humility, simplicity, and faithfulness; nor even desire the repute of learning.

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?