You don’t really know a technology until you’ve used it in anger.

The rich are those who play to win. The middle class plays not to lose.

It’s never hard to know if a painting is real art, because if you never tire of looking at it, then it’s art.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

If you buy what you don’t need, you steal from yourself.

Opportunities come but do not linger.

A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make a wind change its direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cats’ meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

If you see someone who has never taken any action before doing a symbolic one-day boycott, don’t tell them that their actions are futile. … People need practice doing things!

This present moment was once the unimaginable future.

Praise by name, criticize by category.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Everything you do - with or without an audience - provides evidence to you about who you are and what you're capable of.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The problem comes from people who are experts in their fields not understanding that not everyone has the same level of expertise or understanding. It’s why some great sporting stars make lousy coaches and why some mediocre players make great coaches.

I write every day, without hope or despair.

The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.