John Fiske (philosopher)

"The ability to imagine relations is one of the most indispensable conditions of all precise thinking. No subject can be named, in the investigation of which it is not imperatively needed; but it can nowhere else be so thoroughly acquired as in the study of mathematics."

"Man does not dwell at the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming suns that make up our galaxy."

"In a very deep sense all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is the increment of the power of the hand."

"The United States—bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, on the east by the primeval chaos, and on the west by the Day of Judgment."