Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

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.

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

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.

It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.