Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.
A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.
For my part, I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use.
Kant’s style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.
I am a misanthrope and yet utterly benevolent, have more than one screw loose yet am a super-idealist who digests philosophy more efficiently than food.
The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
The first time I saw nitroglycerine was in the beginning of the Crimean War. Professor Zinin in St. Petersburg exhibited some to my father and me, and struck some on an anvil to show that only the part touched by the hammer exploded without spreading.
The only true solution would be a convention under which all the governments would bind themselves to defend collectively any country that was attacked.
The truthful man is usually a liar.
For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.
Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.
I would not leave anything to a man of action as he would be tempted to give up work; on the other hand, I would like to help dreamers as they find it difficult to get on in life.
I am a misanthrope yet utterly benevolent.
Lawyers have to make a living, and can only do so by inducing people to believe that a straight line is crooked.
Justice is to be found only in the imagination.
I am not aware that I have deserved any notoriey, and I have no taste for its buzz.
Hope is nature’s veil for hiding truth’s nakedness.
One can state, without exaggeration, that the observation of and the search for similarities and differences are the basis of all human knowledge.
Worry is the stomach’s worst poison.
It is not sufficient to be worthy of respect in order to be respected.
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.