“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.”

Darkness, that here surrounds our purblind understanding, will vanish at the dawning of eternal day.

God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes.

In the Bible the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance.

The veneration, wherewith Men are imbued for what they call Nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures of God. For many have not only look’d upon it, as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt.

The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of mans redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation.

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.

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.

My dad raised me with some good advice: ‘Always tell the truth. Always shoot from the hip. You might not have many friends, but you’ll never have enemies, because people will always know where you’re coming from.’

However softly we speak, God is so close to us that he can hear us; nor do we need wings to go in search of him, but merely to seek solitude and contemplate him within ourselves, without being surprised to find such a good Guest there.

How the feeling of never being good enough rarely ever wears off her chest.

Everyone told me it was a really stupid idea to start my own hedge fund right out of business school. That’s how I knew that it was a good idea.

A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: “You don’t seem smart enough to be so good at what you’re doing. Do you have an explanation?”

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.