Echoes

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

I would prefer inarticulate wisdom to loquacious foolishness.

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

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

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity, when contrasted with a finer intelligence.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man, or resemble a poor man. Study cannot be helpful unless you take pains to live simply; and living simply is voluntary poverty.

Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.

Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but truth is a greater friend.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

You must know the big ideas in the big disciplines and use them routinely — all of them, not just a few.

For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?

Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.

Silence is a fence around wisdom.

Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds… to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.