William Gilbert Quotations

If you wish in this world to advance your merits you're bound to enhance; you must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet, or, trust me, you haven't a chance.

The House of Peers, throughout the war, did nothing in particular, and did it very well.

You have no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself and how little I deserve it.

My family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering.

And I always voted at my party's call,And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

He combines the manners of a Marquis with the morals of a Methodist.

We will hang you, never fear, Most politely, most politely.

He is an Englishman! / For he himself has said it, / And it's greatly to his credit, / That he is an Englishman!

O that the gods would bring to a miserable end such fictitious, crazy, deformed labours, with which the minds of the studious are blinded!

I am never, never, sick at sea. What never? No never! What never? Hardly ever.

The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body.

Philosophy is for the few.

The magnet's name the observing Grecians drew. From the magnetic region where it grew.

Humor is a drug which it's the fashion to abuse.

A lodestone is a wonderful thing in very many experiments, and like living things. And one of its remarkable virtues in that which the ancients considered to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes and in the stars, in the sun and in the moon.

Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.