“The town itself is disagreeable; but then, all around, you find an inexpressible beauty of nature.”

“Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.”

“It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.”

“If you have a great work in your head, nothing else thrives near it; all other thoughts are repelled, and the pleasure of life itself is for the time lost.”

“Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.”

“Whatever truths or fables you may find in a thousand books, it is all a tower of Babel unless love holds it together.”

“Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.”