The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb.

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

Law is mind without reason.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual’s own reason and critical analysis.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

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.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces, which our senses determine by its position to bodies, and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space.

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.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Reason is the enemy of faith.

Everything for me is sacred, beginning with earth, but also going to things made by man.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

The world is indebted for all triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: ‚This is my country.‘

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.