“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.”

“It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.”

“My first, and most lasting, addiction has always been to the obsessive study of any matter that took hold of my curiosity.”

“But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.”

“The great passions had never been moved by a perfect body but by an evolved mind.”

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”