You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy best among miners; and so with everything else.

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

Life is too short to drink bad wine.

People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude towards the public.

If it is the greatest truth that you seek, the plants can direct you.

Alas, I have studied philosophy, the law as well as medicine, and to my sorrow, theology; studied them well with ardent zeal, yet here I am, a wretched fool, no wiser than I was before.