“Let us be well assured of the Matter of Fact, before we trouble our selves with enquiring into the Cause. It is true, that this Method is too slow for the greatest part of Mankind, who run naturally to the Cause, and pass over the Truth of the Matter of Fact.”

Nothing can be more destructive to ambition, and the passion for conquest, than the true system of astronomy. What a poor thing is even the whole globe in comparison of the infinite extent of nature!

Neatness is a crowning grace of womanhood.

Nature is never so admired as when she is understood.

Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.

I have lived one hundred years; and I die with the consolation of never having thrown the slightest ridicule upon the smallest virtue.

The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet.

As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property.

Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it’s fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.

It is beauty that begins to please, and tenderness that completes the cbarm.

Our sun enlightens the planets that belong to him; why may not every fixed star also have planets to which they give light?

A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place.

A philospher sees the Earth as a large planet, travelling through the heavens, covered with fools

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

I spent my childhood scrambling round badgers and foxes and playing fantastic country kid games like knocking on people’s doors and running away. God that was a good game.

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

Now to escape involves not just running away, but arriving somewhere.

You need experience around you when you are a young player. You need to know how to run a team, to lead a team and to play as a team which means, your team has leaders but you still function as a team.

Women don’t run around saying, “Oh, I took a Bodysex workshop, and I had so much fun, and Betty Dodson taught us how to blah blah.” They come, they go, and I rarely hear from them again.

Yes, I was in that game where George Brett hit that home run. Billy saw there was too much pine tar on the bat and he went to the umpire, the next thing we knew they were fighting about it.

It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.