Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence upon us.

Merit is never so conspicuous as when coupled with an obscure origin, just as the moon never appears so lustrous as when it emerges from a cloud.