Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.

The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.