It has taken seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism, but the English do not think they bought their laws too dearly.

my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is its frame

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

There is no such thing as an accident. What we call by that name is the effect of some cause which we do not see.

One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence.

All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around a million of stars, the activity of light, the life of all animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles.