A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value.

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not any man’s greed.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.

If you make an ass out of yourself, there will always be someone to ride you.

The Rich must live more simply so that the Poor may simply live.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Put every great teacher together in a room, and they'd agree about everything; put their disciples in there and they'd argue about everything.

A man who is convinced of the truth of his religion is indeed never tolerant. At the least, he is to feel pity for the adherent of another religion but usually it does not stop there. The faithful adherent of a religion will try first of all to convince those that believe in another religion and usually he goes on to hatred if he is not successful. However, hatred then leads to persecution when the might of the majority is behind it. In the case of a Christian clergyman, the tragic-comical is found in this: that the Christian religion demands love from the faithful, even love for the enemy. This demand, because it is indeed superhuman, he is unable to fulfill. Thus intolerance and hatred ring through the oily words of the clergyman. The love, which on the Christian side is the basis for the conciliatory attempt towards Judaism is the same as the love of a child for a cake. That means that it contains the hope that the object of the love will be eaten up... Letter to Rabbi Solomon Goldman of Chicago's Anshe Emet Congregation.

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.

While religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra. Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of one's fellow. men. This competitive spirit prevails even in school and, destroying all feelings of human fraternity and cooperation, conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive and thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition and fear of rejection. There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that religious teachings are utopian ideals and unsuited to afford guidance in human affairs. The study of the social patterns in certain so-called primitive cultures, however, seems to have made it sufficiently evident that such a defeatist view is wholly unwarranted.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. … I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

You think it's a conspiracy by the networks to put bad shows on TV. But the shows are bad because that's what people want. It's not like Windows users don't have any power. I think they are happy with Windows, and that's an incredibly depressing thought.

Everyone wants to be strong and self sufficient, but nobody is willing to put in the work necessary to achieve these goals.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.