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.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Some people come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.