The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Philosophy comes too late to teach the world what it should have been; it only shows what the world has been.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. But the vast majority of what gets taught in school is not actionable — it's meant to signal that you're educated, not to help you think. The moment you realize school is mostly about certification, not education, you can start actually learning.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking. And yet this refinement is purchased at a terrible price — the price of losing touch with the concrete and the living, and of substituting for it a pale, bloodless abstraction.

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life. And yet most men are satisfied to read what chance puts before them, without ever troubling themselves to inquire whether it is the best or the worst.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can organize for action; give them more and it may become injurious. Some men are heavy and stupid from undigested learning.

We are beginning to see that to ask what is the use of science is as vulgar as to ask what is the use of a sunset, and almost as stupid.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to wade into its waters.

The multitude of men agree in this: that they equate thinking with reading, and spare themselves the trouble of thinking, because they are able to read. They thus very much resemble those who to escape from want have sold their heritage, and now hope to live by their wages from those who have acquired it.

A fact is not a truth until you love it.

The human mind is like a flashlight in the dark. It illuminates a small circle of the world around us, but beyond that circle lies an infinite darkness that we can never fully penetrate.

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar overcrowded with cheap wares, all of them perhaps useful or insignificant, jostling against each other and preventing the customer from getting what he really needs.

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bazaar encumbered with rich but cumbersome and never to be used articles.

The best investment is in yourself, but the second-best is often in businesses where you can understand what they do and where they're going better than the market does.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What we call imagination is just knowledge of the world.

The mind itself is the medium of all knowledge, and the quality of that knowledge depends upon the quality of the mind. A dull mind will produce dull knowledge; a penetrating mind will penetrate to the heart of things.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is not to arrive at immutable truths but to develop progressively better approximations of reality.