Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.

It is a fool's plan to teach a man to be a cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war.

The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.

The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.