The worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.