This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however, ancient, can be trusted without proof. ... Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.