We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.
Governments are best classified by considering who are the “somebodies” they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.
Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.
In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.
Error is the price we pay for progress.
Wisdom alone is true ambition’s aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.
Let me here remind you that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate.
Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it.
Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.
The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.
Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things.