Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

‚O sleep, O gentle sleep,‘ I thought gratefully, ‚Nature’s soft nurse!‘

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success.

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

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.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

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

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.