“We employ the mind to rule, the body to serve.”

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.

To hope for safety in flight, when you have turned away from the enemy the arms by which the body is defended, is indeed madness. In battle those who are most afraid are always in most danger; but courage is equivalent to rampart.

Not by vows nor by womanish prayers is the help of the gods obtained; success comes through vigilance, energy, wise counsel.

Among intellectual pursuits, one of the most useful is the recording of past events.

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

Necessity makes even the timid brave.

In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense.

The renown which riches or beauty confer is fleeting and frail mental excellence is a splendid and lasting possession.

Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all – they produced an oyster.

Of the cosmic Gods some make the world be, others animate it, others harmonize it, consisting as it does of different elements; the fourth class keep it when harmonized.

It is a law of human nature that in victory even the coward may boast of his prowess, while defeat injures the reputation even of the brave.

To desire the same things and to reject the same things, constitutes true friendship.

Of the bodies in the cosmos, some imitate mind and move in orbits; some imitate soul and move in a straight line, fire and air upward, earth and water downward.

They envy the distinction I have won; let them therefore, envy my toils, my honesty, and the methods by which I gained it.

In my opinion, he only may be truly said to live and enjoy his being who is engaged in some laudable pursuit, and acquires a name by some illustrious action, or useful art.

The very life which we enjoy is short.

Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

The successful construction of all machinery depends on the perfection of the tools employed; and whoever is a master in the arts of tool-making possesses the key to the construction of all machines… The contrivance and construction of tools must therefore ever stand at the head of the industrial arts.

I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.

Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed.

I have long been profoundly convinced that in the very nature of things, employers and employees are partners, not enemies; that their interests are common not opposed; that in the long run the success of each is dependent upon the success of the other.

The ruler should employ person in tasks according to their abilities because Knowers ( or the means ) and efficient employees make impossible tasks also possible.

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

We cannot afford to spend millions and millions over nuclear arms when there is poverty and unemployment all around us.