Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.

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

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

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.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.