The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

To philosophize is to learn to die.

Oh, what a valiant faculty is hope.

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.

One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.

He loves little who loves by rule.