“I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”

Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us – of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

He who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

A language, like a species, when extinct, never – reappears.

Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.

It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.

Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.