Priests and physicians should never look one another in the face. They have no common ground, nor is there any to mediate betweenthem. When the one comes, the other goes. They could not come together without laughter, or a significant silence, for the one's profession is a satire on the other's, and either's success would be the other's failure.

You can hardly convince a man of error in a life-time, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grand-children may be. The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.

Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaininggross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?

I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me.