The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.

We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

The house is a castle which the King cannot enter.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.