The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
Skepticism is not an end in itself; it is a tool for the discovery of truths.
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.
Isolation always perverts; when a man lives only among his own sort, he soon begins to believe that his sort are the best sort. This attitude breeds both the arrogance of the conservative and the bitterness of the radical.
A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, "You Only Live Once."
Any creed whose basic doctrines do not include respect for the creeds of others, is simply power politics masquerading as philosophy.
Many people know how to work hard; many others know how to play well; but the rarest talent in the world is the ability to introduce elements of playfulness into work, and to put some constructive labor into our leisure.
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying 'It got lost,' and say, 'I lost it.'
The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.
The deepest and rarest kind of courage has nothing to do with feats or obstacles in the outside world; and, indeed, has nothing to do with the outside world - it is the courage to be who you are.
Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.
We must become masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another person determine whether we will be rude or gracious, elated or depressed is to give control of ourselves. The only true possession is self possession.
Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?
American parents, on the whole, do not want their sons to be artisans or craftsmen, but business or professional people. As a result, millions of youngsters are being prepared for careers they have little aptitude for - and little interest in except for dubious prestige.
Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest," but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.
Happiness is a direction, not a place.
We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.
Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
Every rule in the book can be broken, except one - be who you are, and become all you were meant to be.
Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.
The pessimist sees only the tunnel; the optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel; the realist sees the tunnel and the light - and the next tunnel.
There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: