“If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.”

“Just go on reading, as well as you can, and be sure that when the children get the thrill of the story, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer.”

“His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was justa man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But hisdiscourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neitherdisgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but onthe contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged tomore orderly, contented, hopeful lives.”

“As wedwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an orderedUniverse without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of moredelicate intellectual fibre than their fellows--men whose minds have, asit were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to usstray messages between these two mysteries”

“Murder your darlings.”

“We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve.”

“That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.‘You appear to be astonished,’ he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. ‘Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.’‘To forget it!’‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I consider that a man’s brain is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.’‘But the Solar System!’ I protested.‘What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently: ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”