“The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”
“All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.”
“Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.”
“A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.”
“It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.”
“Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
“The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.”
“Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.”
“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”
“The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying”
“It is the fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end and superstitions.”
“Time, whose tooth gnaws away at everything else, is powerless against truth.”
“Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.”
“There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.”
“In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.”
“The world makes up for all its follies and injustices by being damnably sentimental.”
“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
“Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.”
“Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.”
“If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”
“Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?”
“There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.”
“Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”
“No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.”
“The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge.”
“There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.”
“Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.”
“We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.”
“There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.”