The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.