We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. ... These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a property in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.

Fractures well cured make us more strong.

We can only obey our own polarity.

Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.