The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.

I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.

Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.

It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.

Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than humans would at first suppose.