Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system.
The merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.
Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion.
So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
Disputing the commonsense notion that all events require the prior existence of some underlying matter or substance. There is no antecedent static cabinet.
To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language.
Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.
The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir.
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren’t.
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.