Nature is not a temple but a workshop, and man is the workman in it. Men judge things according to their own feelings; they forget that in time all things change their aspect.

The animal needing something knows how much it needs; the man does not.

The thing about man is that he knows what other animals do not: that he must die. And though he tries to forget it, this knowledge pursues him through his days like a creditor he cannot pay.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference man brings imagination — and that is the beginning of all we call civilization.

It is a great mistake to think that the motive which leads a man of science to his work is the desire for practical application. He is moved chiefly by curiosity, that most profound, most arrogant, and most invincible of all the passions.

The child who desires education will be educated by his family, by his church, by every circumstance he meets and by his own will; the child who does not want education will not be educated even if he attends school forty years.

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the state but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not even as random as that, for we are each the result of one particular egg meeting one particular sperm, when so easily it might have been another.

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles; it is feeling. Reason is the slave of the passions, and ought only to be so.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

The healthy man does not torture others. Generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The thing about man is that he knows what he is only after he has wasted most of what he had. Self-knowledge is the end of man, not his beginning; we arrive at it as exiles return to a country they have never seen.

Every invalid is a physician. What does it matter that his prescriptions are all for himself?

We are what we are because we have been what we have been, and what is needed for solving the problems of human life and morals is not the wish to extinguish the past, but a better understanding of it.

We are always in search of the redeeming quality or deed that shall make us satisfied with our own evil and ours is a life that is not to be separated from the evil to which it gives birth.

We are faces of the same soul, brothers in one splendid body, and our quarrel is the fever of our blood; it will pass. But what we are building will not pass.

The demand of the loveless and the serving for love is written over every page of social history; but few of us are brave enough to read the script.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet the history of science is largely the history of our stubborn insistence that it must be.

We are accustomed to see men deride what they do not understand, and snarl at the good and beautiful because it lies beyond their sympathies.

We are all of us the living graves of extinct beasts, and often the beast stirs in us and utters some old, forgotten note that sends strange vibrations through the framework of our being.

We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another's than of our own.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. And the greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

We are all of us the worse for too much liberty, and the better for a master hand over us at times; yet we struggle with all our might against that master hand when it is laid upon us.

The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. It is indifferent to our need for certainty, and it is precisely this indifference that makes the pursuit of understanding so urgent.

We are always making gods of those who are indifferent to us, and martyrs of those who love us.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves. It is strange that the most brutal of passions should be the most spiritual.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a manthe other day picking up an arrowhead on the Assabet, and it suggested the same thoughts as if I had found it myself—that there is something very congenial between the sight of such an object and the human mind.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. And the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners — yet what is health but the name we give to our present ignorance of what ails us?

The universe is not cruel, nor is it kind — it is simply what it is, and we are the creatures who discovered sorrow by learning to want what it cannot give us.

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to age and die in the same prison is mocked by nature, which proceeds by ceaseless mutation and transformation.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.