“Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.”

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

I think myself obliged, whatever my private apprehensions may be of the success, to do my duty, and leave events to their Disposer.

Even when we find not what we seek, we find something as well worth seeking as what we missed.

In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenceless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a part.

From a knowledge of His work, we shall know Him.

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another’s learning.

He whose faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his faith.

Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry.

Exalt your passion by directing and settling it upon an object the due con-templation of whose loveliness may cure perfectly all hurts received from mortal beauty.

The inspired and expired air may be sometimes very useful, by condensing and cooling the blood that passeth through the lungs; I hold that the depuration of the blood in that passage, is not only one of the ordinary, but one of the principal uses of respiration.

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

God would not have made the universe as it is unless He intended us to understand it.

Nature always looks out for the preservation of the universe.

God is the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.

He that condescended so far, and stooped so low, to invite and bring us to heaven, will not refuse us a gracious reception there.

Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme.

It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.

And I’m afraid, in this day and age, trust, which I count so, you know, I love loyalty. I love trust.

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.