Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside- and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment....'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

Blind acceptance never leads to a solution; at best it leads only to a standstill and is paid for heavily in the next generation.

As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.

I always learn a lot when I do so. You know, when you step out of your comfort zone and even your cynical zone, and open yourself up to what other people might experience and why they do so.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

The telephone book is full of facts but it doesn't contain a single idea.

Those who go to college and never get out are called professors.