If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.

The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.

Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.