George Iles Quotes & Sayings

#1. Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

#2. A tree nowhere offers a straight line or a regular curve, but who doubts that root, trunk, boughs, and leaves embody geometry?

George Iles

#3. A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

George Iles

#4. Error held as truth has much the effect of truth. In politics and religion this fact upsets many confident predictions.

George Iles

#5. Degree is much: the whole Atlantic might be lukewarm and never boil us a potato.

George Iles

#6. Some young folks have wind-fall minds, prematurely detached from the tree of knowledge for a life-long sourness and pettiness.

George Iles

#7. Boundaries which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. Let chemists and physicists dig deep enough, and they reach common ground.

George Iles

#8. A man's own addition to what he learns is cement to bind an otherwise loose heap of stones into a structure of unity, strength, and use.

George Iles

#9. When we try to imagine a chaos we fail ... In its very fiber the mind is an order and refuses to build a chaos.

George Iles

#10. No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.

George Iles

#11. Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.

George Iles

#12. Ignorance may find a truth on its doorstep that erudition vainly seeks in the stars.

George Iles

#13. Ten builders rear an arch, each in turn lifting it higher; but it is the tenth man, who drops in the keystone, who hears our huzzas.

George Iles

#14. Dumbness and silence are two different things.

George Iles

#15. Educated folk keep to one another's company too much, leaving other people much like milk skimmed of its cream.

George Iles

#16. Discovery begins by finding the discoverer.

George Iles

#17. We despair of changing the habits of men, still we would alter institutions, the habits of millions of men.

George Iles

#18. When a learner, in the fullness of his powers, comes to great truths unstaled by premature familiarity, he rejoices in the lateness of his lessons.

George Iles

#19. Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.

George Iles

#20. They will listen with both ears to what is said by the men just a step or two ahead of them, who stand nearest to them, and within arm's reach. A guide ceases to be of any use when he strides so far ahead as to be hidden by the curvature of the earth.

George Iles

#21. Let truth be a banner big enough to hide the man who holds it up.

George Iles

#22. Truth is better disengaged from error than torn from it.

George Iles

#23. A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.

George Iles

#24. Nature is full of by-ends. A moth feeds on a petal, in a moment the pollen caught on its breast will be wedding this blossom to another in the next county.

George Iles