Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.

The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.

The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

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