Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?

Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.

We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe; can we not take the leap?

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them.

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?

[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.

But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.