Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box.

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: "he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone." But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

'Infidel' is a term of reproach, which Christians and Mohammedans, in their modesty, agree to apply to those who differ from them.

Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes.