Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
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.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
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.
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.
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
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.
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.
