Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not it is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

If a little knowledge is dangerous - where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture - and very much to our credit.

If some great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right on condition of being some sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed I should close instantly with the offer.

The chess-board is the world the pieces are the phenomena of the universe the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair just and patient. But also we know to our cost that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins in the eyes of most people is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.