Joseph Priestley Quotes

23 quotes in 427 categories

• In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.
• The greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined. But, notwithstanding this, the more…
• It pleased God to make one nation the medium of all His communications with mankind: This the nation of the Jews has done to a…
• But it is not given to every electrician to die in so glorious a manner as the justly envied Richmann.
• It is no use speaking in soft, gentle tones if everyone else is shouting.
• Could we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all the steps by which he produced his great works, we…
• The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
• This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.
• To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you…
• Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to…
• What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.
• In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we…
• I have procured air [oxygen] ... between five and six times as good as the best common air that I have ever met with.
• The feeling of it to my lungs was not sensibly different from that of common air; but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light…
• Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.
• Orthodoxy, my Lord,: said Bishop Warburton, in a whisper, — orthodoxy is my doxy, — heterodoxy is another man's doxy.
• How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may…
• We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire...
• The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
• Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.

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