Quote collection
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader."
"Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry."
"Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement."
"The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought."
"The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change."
"What the learned world tends to offer is one second-hand scrap of information illustrating ideas derived from another second-hand scrap of information. The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity."
"We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities."
"Youth is life as yet unblemished by much tragedy, but hardly by TV."
"An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion."
"Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise."
"There is a quality of life which lies always beyond the mere fact of life; and when we include the quality in the fact, there is still omitted the quality of the quality."
"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."
"The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul."
"Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians."
"It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society ."
"The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. . . . Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about."
"Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts."
"The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort."
"It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest."
"The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable."