Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise
Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas.
The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.
The future belongs to those who can rise above the confines of the earth.
Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.
I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.
As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.
In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.
I always feel that I have two duties to perform with a parting guest: one, to see that he doesn't forget anything that is his; the other, to see that he doesn't take anything that is mine.
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Value is coextensive with reality.
The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications.
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.
With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.
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.
The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.
Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
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