The most entertaining surface on earth is the human face.

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are.

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.