Great Throughts Treasury

"A man is not old as long as he is seeking something."

"Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language."

"Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god."

"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it."

"Far too often the choices reality proposes are such as to take away one's taste for choosing. "

"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions. "

"There are moments when very little truth would be enough to shape opinion. One might be hated at extremely low cost. "

"To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should."

"Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it."

"It takes a very deep-rooted opinion to survive unexpressed. "

"It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of. "

"One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it. "

"Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth. "

"We spend our time envying people whom we wouldn't wish to be."

"When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic. "