The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

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

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.

A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.