The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

The earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.

And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

Too busy with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars.