Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog h….

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture ….

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our ac….

We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not kn….

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis..

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra..

He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart..

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe..

An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the variou….

If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him fro….

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by inves….

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least ….

There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey..

The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of even….

When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that..

It cannot be doubted that theistic belief is a comfort and a solace to those who hold it, and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot b….

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land..

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in….

An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano..

scientific thought does not mean thought about scientific subjects with long names. There are no scientific subjects. The subject of science is the h….

The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose t….