The true delight is in the finding out 

rather than in the knowing.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song 

above hoarded gold, 

it would be a merrier world.

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; 

they are not here to worship what is known, 

but to question it.

It is generally much more shameful 

to lose a good reputation 

than never to have acquired it.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. 

Hope is the dream of a waking man.

The best scientist is open to experience 

and begins with romance — 

the idea that anything is possible.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. 

It has created the word loneliness 

to express the pain of being alone. 

And it has created the word solitude 

to express the glory of being alone.

People are not disturbed by things, 

but by the view they take of them.

All men dream, but not equally. 

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, 

wake in the day to find that it was vanity: 

but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, 

for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, 

to make them possible.

Imagination creates reality.

What people say, 

what people do, 

and what they say they do 

are entirely different things.

To know what you prefer 

instead of humbly saying Amen 

to what the world tells you ought to prefer, 

is to have kept your soul alive.

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

The most thought-provoking thing 

in our thought-provoking time 

is that we are still not thinking.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

All credibility, 

all good conscience, 

all evidence of truth 

come only from the senses.

Blessed is the man, 

who having nothing to say, 

abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Loss and possession, death and life are one, 

There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, 

as the confidence of their help.

We are all apprentices in a craft 

where no one ever becomes a master.

Art is not what you see, 

but what you make others see.

The only real failure in life is 

not to be true 

to the best one knows.

We live in a fantasy world, 

a world of illusion. 

The great task in life is to find reality.

If you can speak what you will never hear, 

if you can write what you will never read, 

you have done rare things.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; 

the passions we feel dilate it, 

those that inspire us shrink it, 

and habit fills it.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold 

is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

In argument 

similes are like songs in love; 

they describe much, 

but prove nothing.

If you do not change direction, 

you may end up where you are heading.

The time you enjoy wasting 

is not wasted time.

The first step to participation in the destiny of humanity today, 

which is neither of this folk nor of that, 

but of the whole population of the globe, 

is to recognise every such local image of a god 

as but one of many thousands, millions, even perhaps billions, 

of locally useful symbolisations 

of that same mystery 

beyond sight or thought 

which our teachers have taught us to seek 

in their god alone.

Nationalism is power hunger 

tempered by self-deception.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded 

rather schematically 

as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, 

which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.

Truth is so obscure in these times, 

and falsehood so established, 

that, unless we love the truth, 

we cannot know it.

He who wonders discovers 

that this in itself is wonder.

The supreme question 

about a work of art 

is 

out of how deep a life 

does it spring.

Think like a wise man 

but communicate in the language of the people.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, 

the clearer we should see through it.

Let him that would move the world 

first move himself.

But what is happiness 

except the simple harmony 

between a man and the life he leads?

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. 

That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.

The only thing that can save the world 

is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. 

That's what poetry does.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy 

is in the eyes of others 

only a green thing that stands in the way. 

Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... 

and some scarce see nature at all. 

But to the eyes of the man of imagination, 

nature is imagination itself.