Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.
I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.
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.
In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.