Explore Quotes by George Iles

Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

A man's own addition to what he learns is cement to bind an otherwise loose heap of stones into a structure of unity, strength, and use.

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.

Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the keystone, who hears our huzzas.

No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.

Nature is full of by-ends. A moth feeds on a petal, in a moment the pollen caught on its breast will be wedding this blossom to another in the next county.

Let truth be a banner big enough to hide the man who holds it up.

Ignorance may find a truth on its doorstep that erudition vainly seeks in the stars.

Discovery begins by finding the discoverer.

When a learner, in the fullness of his powers, comes to great truths unstaled by premature familiarity, he rejoices in the lateness of his lessons.

Truth is better disengaged from error than torn from it.

Some young folks have wind-fall minds, prematurely detached from the tree of knowledge for a life-long sourness and pettiness.

When we try to imagine a chaos we fail. ... In its very fiber the mind is an order and refuses to build a chaos.

Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.

Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.

Is any knowledge worthless? Try to think of an example.

Dumbness and silence are two different things.

To render aid to the worthless is sheer waste. Rain does not freshen the Dead Sea, but only enables it to dissolve more salt.

Evolution pays and that is why there is evolution