Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to willful blindness and superstition.

How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day!

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

False doctrine does not necessarily make a man a heretic, but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.