To put failure behind you, face up to it.

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. … I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame… I was utterly at a loss how to account for it.