Skill to do comes of doing.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest good men.

Unhappily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

We are the prisoners of ideas.