Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.
To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.
Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed.
Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.
Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.
Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.
Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.
Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.
The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.
Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.
A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.