"Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals by Maria Mitchell on Projekt Gutenberg"

“There is a God, and he is good, I say to myself. I try to increase my trust in this, my only article of creed.”

“There is this great danger in student life. Now, we rest all upon what Socrates said, or what Copernicus taught; how can we dispute authority which has come down to us, all established, for ages? We must at least question it; we cannot accept anything as granted, beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.”

“The great gain would be freedom of thought. Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.”

“An English village could never be mistaken for an American one: the outline against the sky differs; a thatched cottage makes a very wavy line on the blue above.”

“Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.”