“Nature always looks out for the preservation of the universe.”

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.

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.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

It is not strange to me that persons of the fair sex should like, in all things about them, the handsomeness for which they find themselves most liked.

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.

He that said it was not good for man to be alone, placed the celibate amongst the inferior states of perfection.

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

Sound consists of an undulating motion of the air.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

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.

It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.

As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.