He is not handsome, but looks as the author of his books should look: a little strange and odd, as if not of this earth. - Maria Popova

The children of the sun, happy people whose eyes shone with a bright radiance and whose faces gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.”
(paraphrasing Dostoyevsky, from Notes from the Underground).

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one's competences.

Above all, Somerville possessed the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being — the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers, remaining receptive to novel theories and willing to change one’s mind in light of new evidence.