Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge.
If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.
Hatred is active displeasure, envy passive. We need not wonder that envy turns to soon to hatred.
What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves.
Every idea appears at first as a strange visitor, and when it begins to be realized, it is hardly distinguishable from fantasy.
Certain faults are necessary to the individual if he is to exist.
To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.
Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.
Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.
If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.
A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours.
Over the trackless past, somewhere, Lie the lost days of our tropic youth, Only regained by faith and prayer, Only recalled by prayer and plaint, Each lost day has its patron saint!
Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquility of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites.
Who enslaves another’s manhood with weak human power alone, Lays a heavier yoke of bondage thoughtlessly upon his own.
There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again.
Tolerance should, strictly speaking, be only a passing mood; it ought to lead to acknowledgment and appreciation. To tolerate a person is to affront him.