Every really able man, in whatever direction he works - a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter - if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.

Let us replace sentimentalism by realism and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.