“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.”
“Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.”
“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.”
“No one who achieves success does so without the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.”
“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.”
“Seek simplicity, and distrust it.”
“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.”
“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”
“We think in generalities, but we live in detail.”
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
“A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.”
“The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.'”
“Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.”
“Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.”
“The history of Western philosophy is, for the most part, the history of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
“True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.”
“A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.”
“Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.”
“In the conditions of modern life, the rule is absolute: the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”
“Life is an internal teleology.”
“Knowledge keeps no better than fish.”
“The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”
“Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”
“The worst that can happen to a man is to lose his enthusiasm.”
“Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”
“Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge.”
“The importance of knowledge is the belief that you can discover the truth.”
“The power of God is the worship He inspires.”
“Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.”
“Understanding is often a slow, incremental process.”
“A great society is one in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.”
“The limits of thought cannot be settled beforehand.”
“Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.”
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
“Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas.”
“The universe is vast, but not unfriendly to man’s search for understanding.”
“The pursuit of truth is an adventure of the mind.”
“Reason is the organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.”
“In philosophy, as in politics, the longest future must be expected from those who concern themselves with the most remote past.”
“A thinker requires time to contemplate the complexities of life.”
“Harmony, in this sense, is not the absence of conflict, but the recognition of interdependence.”
“The function of reason is to promote the art of life.”
“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.”
“Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”
“Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.”
“The worth of men consists in their capacity to act as reservoirs of the past and conductors of the future.”
“All truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”
“Wisdom is the fruit of reflection and experience.”
“To be human is to experience the world as an arena of possibilities.”
“The vitality of thought is an adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.”