“Do not Christians and Heathens, and Jews and Gentiles, and poets and philosophers, unite in allowing the starry influences?”

A Christmas gambol oft could cheer The poor man’s heart through half the year.

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it.

Where is the coward that would not dare to fight for such a land as Scotland?

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances.

Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.

A glass of good wine is a gracious creature, and reconciles poor mortality to itself and that is what few things can do.

Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!

Good Night, Goodnight, Dream.

Silence, maiden; thy tongue outruns thy discretion.

Blessed be his name, who hath appointed the quiet night to follow the busy day, and the calm sleep to refresh the wearied limbs and to compose the troubled spirit.

It is only when I dally with what I am about, look back and aside, instead of keeping my eyes straight forward, that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

Caution comes too late when we are in the midst of evils.

I have heard men talk about the blessings of freedom, he said to himself, but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.

To make discoveries, you have to be curious about why the universe is the way it is.

Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

The first principle of solid wisdom is discretion, without it all the erudition of life is merely bagatelle.

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

People think of education as something that they can finish.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

Working is part of life, I don’t know how to distinguish between the two. Work is an expression of life.

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.