Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

Men are like bank accounts. The more money, the more interest they generate.

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.