The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense.
There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.
The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.
The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.
The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?
My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don’t get right.
Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.
It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.