The instructor can scarcely give sensibility where it is essentially wanting, nor talent to the unpercipient block. But he can cultivate and direct the affections of the pupil, who puts forth, as a parasite, tendrils by which to cling, not knowing to what - to a supporter or a destroyer.

But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.

After days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life. Nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

My father was not scientific, and I was left to struggle with a child's blindness, added to a student's thirst for knowledge.

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.