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.
No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.