A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.
Error is the price we pay for progress.
Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.
If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.
In its solitariness the spirit asks, ‘What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life?’ And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
It is a profoundly erroneous truism...that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
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.
It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts.
No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of all rationality.
Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonize, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things.
Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.
Scientists, animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless, constitute an interesting subject for study.
Seek simplicity and distrust it.
Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality.
The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.
The chief error in philosophy is overstatement.
The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.
The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.
The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.
The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other.... The souls of men are the gift from language to mankind.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.