p. 8 Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
p. 16 ...nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose, - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
p. 48 He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies, and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said, that 'these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.
p. 49 A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone.
p. 53 Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
p. 56 If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
p. 75 My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and more than all, thy lovely lake!
p. 172 How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!
p. 195 Could I behold this, and live? Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated.
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