A great man of science ... knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg does not turn into a crocodile and two or three other little things." http://diggingupthefuture.wordpress.com/

[A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world,... could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.

I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.

You are literally filled with the fruit of your own devices, with rats and mice and such small deer, paramecia, and entomostraceæ, and kicking things with horrid names, which you see in microscopes at the Polytechnic, and rush home and call for brandy-without the water-stone, and gravel, and dyspepsia, and fragments of your own muscular tissue tinged with your own bile.

Mathematical knowledge is not-as all Cambridge men are surely aware-the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.

In the light of fuller day, Of purer science, holier laws.