If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.

Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.

There are both dull correctness and piquant carelessness; it is needless to say which will command the most readers and have the most influence.

We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.

Logic and metaphysics make use of more tools than all the rest of the sciences put together, and do the least work.

Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Dreams ought to produce no conviction whatever on philosophical minds. If we consider how many dreams are dreamt every night, and how many events occur every day, we shall no longer wonder at those accidental coincidences which ignorance mistakes for verifications.