The real history does not get written, because it is not in people’s brains but in their nerves and vitals.
There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
When success turns a man’s head he faces failure.
An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.
There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.
Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.
A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure, a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment...
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.