Necessity is the mother of invention.

If you're not learning while you're earning, you're cheating yourself out of the better portion of your compensation.

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

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 first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

My weapon is literature

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

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

It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.

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

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

Investigate, educate and organize.

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

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.