The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.

Until death, all defeat is psychological.

The shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story.

Energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Jargon is the dark matter of academia—it occupies space, adds weight, but lets no light through. [...] To explain something plainly is not to cheapen it; it is to grant the listener entry into the idea.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can't buy.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

A step backwards after making a wrong turn is a step in the right direction.

Opportunity follows difficulty.

What I learned on my own I still remember.

If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.

The world is not designed to give you a good life. It's designed to distract you from building one.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

It has been claimed that only three people read the three volumes of Russell and Whitehead’s monumental Principia Mathematica in its entirety, namely Russell, Whitehead, and the proofreader. There has been some scepticism, however, about Russell and Whitehead belonging to the list.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.