Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

Language is the machine of the poet.

The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.