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What is essential is to train the mind so that it is capable of finding facts as it needs them, train it to learn how to learn.
What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.
If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy.
Today the world faces a great challenge: on one side a government preserved by fear, on the other a government of free men. I haven’t ever believed that anything supported by fear can stand against freedom from fear. Surely we cannot be so stupid as to let ourselves become shackled by senseless fears. The result of that would be to have a system of fear imposed on us.
If people come up the financial ladder but still maintain a low educational standard, with its lack of appreciation of many of the things of artistic and spiritual value, the nation will not be able to grow to its real stature.
It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.
Simply accumulating money is not, basically, a sign that one is a successful human being. A miser can do that, but as a man he is a failure. Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world. Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.
If you want your child to develop as an honorable human being you have to practice what you preach.
Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation.
Love and death come to us all, no matter what the circumstances of our lives.
“Anxiety,” Kierkegaard said, “is the dizziness of freedom.”
