Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.

The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.