Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.
Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark.
We despair of changing the habits of men, still we would alter institutions, the habits of millions of men.
A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.
Educated folk keep to one another's company too much, leaving other people much like milk skimmed of its cream.
Nothing cools so fast as undue enthusiasm. Water that has boiled freezes sooner than any other.
Degree is much: the whole Atlantic might be lukewarm and never boil us a potato.
Ignorance may find a truth on its doorstep that erudition vainly seeks in the stars.
When we try to imagine a chaos we fail. ... In its very fiber the mind is an order and refuses to build a chaos.
Some young folks have wind-fall minds, prematurely detached from the tree of knowledge for a life-long sourness and pettiness.
Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.
Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.
Is any knowledge worthless? Try to think of an example.
Dumbness and silence are two different things.
To render aid to the worthless is sheer waste. Rain does not freshen the Dead Sea, but only enables it to dissolve more salt.
Evolution pays and that is why there is evolution
Let truth be a banner big enough to hide the man who holds it up.
Truth is better disengaged from error than torn from it.
When a learner, in the fullness of his powers, comes to great truths unstaled by premature familiarity, he rejoices in the lateness of his lessons.
Discovery begins by finding the discoverer.
Nature is full of by-ends. A moth feeds on a petal, in a moment the pollen caught on its breast will be wedding this blossom to another in the next county.
No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.
Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the keystone, who hears our huzzas.
Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.
A man's own addition to what he learns is cement to bind an otherwise loose heap of stones into a structure of unity, strength, and use.
A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?
They will listen with both ears to what is said by the men just a step or two ahead of them, who stand nearest to them, and within arm's reach. A guide ceases to be of any use when he strides so far ahead as to be hidden by the curvature of the earth.
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.
