Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper. If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts: but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. If any human being earnestly desires to push on to new discoveries instead of just retaining and using the old; to win victories over Nature as a worker rather than over hostile critics as a disputant; to attain, in fact, clear and demonstrative knowlegde instead of attractive and probable theory; we invite him as a true son of Science to join our ranks. If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him. It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth... and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below. It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one. It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self. Knowledge is power. Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything. As in nature, things move violently to their place and calmly in their place, so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm. | 
