By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.