Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.

To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.

What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.

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