Thought, true labor of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of Pain?

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.