"The motive of science was the extension..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Law of Contrariness: Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.”

“...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.”

“What is indispensable to inspiration? ...sound sleep and the provocation of a good book or a companion.”

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

“Sarcastic Science, she would like to know,In her complacent ministry of fear,How we propose to get away from hereWhen she has made things so we have to goOr be wiped out. Will she be asked to showUs how by rocket we may hope to steerTo some star off there, say, a half light-yearThrough temperature of absolute zero?Why wait for Science to supply the howWhen any amateur can tell it now?The way to go away should be the sameAs fifty million years ago we came-If anyone remembers how that wasI have a theory, but it hardly does.”

“[Newton wrote to Halley ... that he would not give Hooke any credit] That, alas, is vanity. You find it in so many scientists. You know, it has always hurt me to think that Galileo did not acknowledge the work of Kepler.”

“The hard and stiff are death's companions. The soft and weak are life's companions.”

“The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.”

“I never before knew the full value of trees....What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.”