In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
The word ‘cause’ is an altar to an unknown god.
The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.
Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
The true’to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird ’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
No decision is, in itself, a decision.
Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, “words, words, words,” must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.