Love and desire are the spirit’s wings to great deeds.
Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee, Then were it worth one’s while a man to be.
If we could do away with death, we wouldn’t object; to do away with capital punishment will be more difficult. Were that to happen, we would reinstate it from time to time.
Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.
Doubt grows with knowledge.
I hate all bungling as I do sin, but particularly bungling in politics, which leads to the misery and ruin of many thousands and millions of people.
Some of our weaknesses are born in us, others are the result of education; it is a question which of the two gives us most trouble.
Life is too short to drink bad wine.
The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity – a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.
The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.
The senses do not deceive us, but the judgment does.
He who does not see the whole world in his friends, does not deserve that the world should hear of him.
The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.
Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole.
The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun’s rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers.
One that does not think to highly of himself is more than he thinks.