What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

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.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

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

God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.

Most men of education are more superstitious than they admit - nay, than they think.

The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.