What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

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.

I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

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.

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.