Never utter the truism but live it among men.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.

Do not believe that possibly you can escape the reward of your action.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism.