Only those works which are well-written will pass to posterity: the amount of knowledge, the uniqueness of the facts, even the novelty of the discove….

Rassemblons des faits pour nous donner des idées. Let us gather facts in order to get ourselves thinking..

The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the germs ….

In Ireland, there are the same fossils, the same shells and the same sea bodies, as appear in America, and some of them are found in no other part of….

Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme..

Style supposes the reunion and the exercise of all the intellectual faculties. The style is the man..

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for….

The discoveries that one can make with the microscope amount to very little, for one sees with the mind's eye and without the microscope the real exi….

Writing well is at one and the same time good thinking, good feeling, and good expression; it is having wit, soul, and taste, all together..

One can descend by imperceptible degree from the most perfect creature to the most shapeless matter, from the best-organised animal to the roughest m….

The cat is the only animal which accepts the comforts but rejects the bondage of domesticity..

Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius..

Man thinks, and at once becomes the master of the beings that do not think..

He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immodera….

Nature is the system of laws established by the Creator for the existence of things and for the succession of creatures. Nature is not a thing, becau….

There is nothing good in love but the physical part..

Let us investigate more closely this property common to animal and plant, this power of producing its likeness, this chain of successive existences o….

We can only penetrate the rind of the earth..

For the little that one has reflected on the origin of our knowledge, it is easy to perceive that we can acquire it only by means of comparison. That….

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste..

Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience..