The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.

The formation of right habits is essential to your permanent security. They diminish your chance of falling when assaulted, and they augment your chance of recovery when overthrown.

If I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honorable neighbor, and a just citizen, I would seek him among the band of Atheists

The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proven to have their counterparts in the world of fact.

Science keeps down the weed of superstition not by logic, but by rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation

Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.

[Louis Rendu] collects observations, makes experiments, and tries to obtain numerical results; always taking care, however, so to state his premises and qualify his conclusions that nobody shall be led to ascribe to his numbers a greater accuracy than they merit. It is impossible to read his work, and not feel that he was a man of essentially truthful mind and that science missed an ornament when he was appropriated by the Church.

Those who are unacquainted with the details of scientific investigation have no idea of the amount of labour expended in the determination of those numbers on which important calculations or inferences depend. They have no idea of the patience shown by a Berzelius in determining atomic weights; by a Regnault in determining coefficients of expansion; or by a Joule in determining the mechanical equivalent of heat.

To him [Faraday], as to all true philosophers, the main value of a fact was its position and suggestiveness in the general sequence of scientific truth.