The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.

Everything Tolstoy wrote is precious, but I found this final statement of the truth about life as he had come to understand it particularly beautiful and moving. 'That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.' So he concludes, giving one a vivid sense of the old man, pen in hand and bent over the paper, his forehead wrinkled into a look of puzzlement very characteristic of him, as though he were perpetually wondering how others could fail to see what was to him so clear - that the law of love explained all mysteries and invalidated all other laws.

When Dwight Eisenhower became president, I personally was delighted. I thought that that was a very good thing.

Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story ...man [is] so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.

I am in a slight difficulty because I find myself in a minute minority there, in that this Sputnik didn't either interest me or frighten me, but that's because I don't, you see, believe that the circumstances of life are the important thing.

The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase - the pursuit of happiness - is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.