The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.

The more experiences and experiments accumulate in the exploration of nature, the more precarious the theories become. But it is not always good to discard them immediately on this account. For every hypothesis which once was sound was useful for thinking of previous phenomena in the proper interrelations and for keeping them in context. We ought to set down contradictory experiences separately, until enough have accumulated to make building a new structure worthwhile.

Many are less fortunate than you' may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.