To listen to a lie is harder than to tell it.

-- Turkish proverb

Many have suffered for talking; none ever suffered for keeping silent.

-- Italian proverb

If men could foresee the future, they would still behave as they do now.

-- Russian proverb

See that you are wise, but also learn to appear ignorant.

-- Armenian proverb

What is research but a blind date with knowledge?

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.

— Chinese proverb.

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing – refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

It's tough to be good at something you're not interested in. It's nearly impossible to be great at something you're not obsessed with.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

People are always trying to add more stuff to life. Reduce it to simpler, pure moments.

The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby.

If you want to change the future, start living as if you're already there.

The test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know.

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.

Wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mold reality to our desires and where we must accept the unaltered with tranquility.

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do.

The greatest sign of an ill-regulated mind is to believe things because you wish them to be so.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.