Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

The profoundly ‚atomic‘ character of the universe is visible in everyday experience, in raindrops and grains of sand, in the hosts of the living, and the multitude of stars; even in the ashes of the dead.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

He who has made a fair compact with poverty is rich.

What we live by we die by.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

The deed is everything, the glory is naught.

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.