It is no wonder that we all more or less delight in the mediocre, because it leaves us in peace: it gives us the comfortable feeling of intercourse with what is like ourselves.
It is difficult to know how to treat the errors of the age. If a man oppose them, he stands alone; if he surrender to them, they bring him neither joy nor credit.
It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.
Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.
Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.
In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance.
In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.
In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.
In art the best is good enough.
Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago.
If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.
If a man thinks about his physical or moral condition, he generally finds that he is ill.