The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things 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 person's training begins, it is probably the last lesson a person learns thoroughly.
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.
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.
A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
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.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.
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 foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying
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.
Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
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.
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.
Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
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.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away at everything else, is powerless against truth.
It is the fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end and superstitions.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.