There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.

Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon.

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

Any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the "anticipation of Nature," that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run.