Quote collection
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance."
"The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people."
"Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China."
"No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers."
"Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues."
"Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life."
"It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence."
"The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality."
"So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century."
"But in the prevalent discussion of classes, there are illegitimate transitions to the notions of a 'nexus' and of a 'proposition'. The appeal to a class to perform the services of a proper entity is exactly analogous to an appeal to an imaginary terrier to kill a real rat. Process and Reality"
"There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel."
"The vitality of thought is in adventure. Idea's won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervour, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong and successful, but without inheriting the fervour; so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age, turns senile, and dies."
"For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance."
"Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality."
"The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence."
"Order is not sufficient. What is required, is something much more complex. It is order entering upon novelty; so that the massiveness of order does not degenerate into mere repetition; and so that the novelty is always reflected upon a background of system."
"The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning."
"I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance."
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are cavalry charges in a battle - they are limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments."
"You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom."