Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.
Every organism requires an environment of friends, partly to shield it from violent changes, and partly to supply it with its wants.
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism, founded upon appreciation of beauty, and of intellectual distinction, and of duty.
God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality...
The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.
Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.
The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.
A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.
Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.
The term many presupposes the term one, and the term one presupposes the term many.
Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.
Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious.
Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.