...there are days when I feel I can do anything and days when I feel I can do nothing. But fortunately for those around me, neither sort occurs very often.

Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or - worse - having empty opinions.

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.

Relatively few of us will find the time-or take it-to live an ever enlarging life.

Be able to recognize the dangerous snakes, spiders, insects, and plants that live in your area of the country.

I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there and they are taught and told what to believe. They are passive from the very beginning, and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told.

The magnitude of an action may change not only the strength of its impact, but the direction. If you became a dentist, for example, you would certainly be an asset to our society. But what if everyone became a dentist? Who would bake the bread? Who would build the houses?