Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper or necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

I knew that the pain I felt now was here to stay. In many forms. Through many nights.

Do not waste your life over working.

If you don’t want anyone to misunderstand you, go into yourself and thoroughly investigate and understand yourself. No one will ever misunderstand you ever again.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.

Constantly to seek the purpose of life is one of the odd escapes of man. If he finds what he seeks it will not be worth that pebble on the path.

I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

Good access to a doctor and a drugstore when you first have a problem can avoid a lot of cost and heartache later.