Nothing cools so fast as undue enthusiasm. Water that has boiled freezes sooner than any other.

No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?

Dumbness and silence are two different things.

A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.

Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the keystone, who hears our huzzas.