“Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on general principles.”

The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

In object lessons in elementary education and in laboratory instruction in higher education, the subject is often so treated that the student fails to see the forest on account of the trees.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

A problem well put is half solved.

In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause, of their backward institutions.

We only think when confronted with a problem.

Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

Hear you don’t believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to understand that I am thinking about something or other most of the time.

There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful.

The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

It is in scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.

Earth’s sweat, the sea.

Iris from sea brings wind or mighty rain.

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

I object to religion in science classrooms not because it’s religion but because it’s not science.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.