All quotes

You visit the earth, and water it. You greatly enrich it. The river of God is full of water. You provide them grain, for so you have ordained it.

By space the Universe encompasses and swallows me as an atom, by thought I encompass it.

You will constantly be surprised to find how little you really know about your work, and how much more somebody else knows about it than you do.

The point is, that we want to be constantly on the lookout for ways of improving whatever work we are engaged in, whether that work be milking cows or doing something else.

No one gets much out of life who does not make his education a real, vital part of himself.

There is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women

There is an indescribable something about work with the hands that tends to develop a student's mind.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.

Although our intellect always feels itself urged towards clearness and certainty, still our mind often feels itself attracted by uncertainty.

By the aid of the Mechanical Notation, the Analytical Engine became a reality: for it became susceptible of demonstration.

Thus the Analytical Engine will possess a library of its own. Every set of cards once made will at any future time reproduce the calculations for which it was first arranged.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

Moreover, the many dead trunks that stand like skeletons, never fail to give to these primeval woods a character of solemnity, absent in those of countries long civilized.

Sitting down on a block of granite, it was delightful to watch the various insects and birds as they flew past.

As the racial distinction of humanity lies in its social relation, so we find the distinctive gains and losses of humanity to lie also in its social relation. We are more affected by our relation to each other than by our physical environment.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best.

Language is our largest common medium, and leads on into literature, which is but preserved speech.

The brain of man is the social organ, the organ of communication. Through it flows the current of thought, whereby we are enabled to work together.

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.

To specialize any form of labor is a step up: to organize it is another step.

What you imagine, you will think, and what you think, you will become.

a man who is always living in the midst of these studies and labours does not perceive when old age creeps upon him

if it has in store any of what I may call the food of study and philosophy, nothing can be pleasanter than an old age of leisure

It’s also about knowing what you know and what you don’t know. It’s about being open to people and ideas.

All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.