From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.
Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.
Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.
I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn’t forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn’t take anything that is mine.
There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.
But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.
Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
War can protect; it cannot create.
Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.
After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.
Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn’t depend on formal schooling.
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages.
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science.
The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
A philosopher of imposing stature doesn’t think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.