I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.

The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments.

All the fairy tales of Aladdin, or the invisible Gyges, or the talisman that opens kings' palaces, or the enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicated the one miracle of intellectual enlargement.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Knowledge is the antidote to fear. [especially as fear often stands for false evidence appearing real!]

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.