In science, mistakes always precede the truth

Our [British] summers are often, though beautiful for verdure, so cold, that they are rather cold winters.

I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.

The contempt of money is no more a virtue than to wash one's hand is one; but one does not willingly shake hands with a man that never washes his.

I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.

Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.