Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
It never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.
It is not enough to know, we must also apply; it is not enough to will, we must also do.
It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape; it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.
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.
Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.
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.
Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago.