Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

Liberty without Learning is always in peril and Learning without Liberty is always in vain.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Civilization is a race between disaster and education.

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Suddenly degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

I think that kids have a greater capacity for processing things than we give them credit for.

Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Courage, conviction and confidence.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.