We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.

I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.

The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand.

Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed.

The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.