Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idea of God ends in a paltry Methodist meeting-house.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter.Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.

Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature.