It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God’s influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
History is a bath of blood.
The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result.
The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience.
Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.
There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
That which is most personal, is most interesting.
A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
The teacher’s prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.