There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact.

A well-worn adage advises those who set out upon a great enterprise to count the cost, yet some of the greatest enterprises have succeeded because the people who undertook them did not count the cost.

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.

Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.

The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.

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

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them.