If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Sky is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.

If some people really see angels where others see only empty space, let them paint the angels: only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.