“While there is life there is hope. I beg to assert…that as long as a man’s heart beats, as long as a man’s flesh quivers, I do not allow that a being gifted with thought and will can allow himself to despair.”

Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.

And whichsoever way thou goest, may fortune follow.

We see that science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.

A scholar has to know a little of everything.

What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?

Why lower oneself to taking pride from being American or British, when you can boast of being man!

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

In the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced.

What I’d like to be above all is a writer.

The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.

All great actions return to God, from whom they are derived.

Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race-unhappily.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

The rich have no more of the kingdom of heaven than they have purchased of the poor by their alms.

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music-not too much, or the soul could not sustain it-from time to time.

For my confirmation, I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.

Hearts are not had as a gift, But hearts are earned.

Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me.

My latest found, Heaven’s last, best gift, my ever new delight!

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.