Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.