Quotes to inspire and reflect

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.

Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.

Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enough to be honest.

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

He that displays too often his wife and his wallet is in danger of having both of them borrowed.

To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security.

Individualism is what makes cooperation worth living.

Wars are necessary to teach us lessons we seem unable to learn any other way.

Every success is the mother of countless others.

Little difficulties are made to swell until they fill our horizon while the real big blessings of life are dwindled down to nothing.

The most dangerous notion a young man can acquire is that there is no more room for originality. There is no large room for anything else.

Of all the follies the elder generation falls victim to this is the most foolish, namely, the constant criticism of the younger element who will not be and cannot be like ourselves because we and they are different tribes produced of different elements in the great spirit of Time.

The gifted man bears his gifts into the world, not for his own benefit, but for the people among whom he is placed; for the gifts are not his, he himself is a gift to the community.

Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars.

There are no big problems; there are just a lot of little problems.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

Education is preeminently a matter of quality, not amount

Vision without execution is just hallucination.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe within any purpose, which is the way it really is, so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.

When I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, I wasn't upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated -- it was getting out of hand.

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. Those of us who are not so tall have to choose.

But the real glory of science is that we can find a way of thinking such that the law is evident.

As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.

Astronomy is older than physics. In fact, it got physics started by showing the beautiful simplicity of the motion of the stars and planets, the understanding of which was the beginning of physics. But the most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.

All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.