If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

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

Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.

We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.