Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
The physical doctrine of the atom has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus .
Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.
The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.
The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about?
In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.
A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.
Error itself may be happy chance.
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality.