Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
