Listening is a lamp that dispels the darkness of ignorance.
Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
Reason is the miner's lamp used in bringing up ore from the mind.
The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.
Thoughts are like stars in the firmament; some are fixed, others like the wandering planets, others again are only like meteors. Understanding is like the Sun, which gives light to all the thoughts. Memory is like the Moon, it hath its new, its full and its wane.
If a photographic plate under the center of a lens focused on the heavens is exposed for hours, it comes to reveal stars so far away that even the most powerful telescopes fail to reveal them to the naked eye. In a similar way, time and concentration allow the intellect to perceive a ray of light in the darkness of the most complex problem.
A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.
Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself.
All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.
The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable.
Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.
Reason is the light, the sun of the brain. It is the compass of the mind, the ever-constant Northern Star, the mountain peak that lifts itself above all clouds.
