A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.