Quote collection
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM."
"I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace."
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
"Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude."
"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."
"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience."
"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern."
"When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top."
"Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies."
"The chief error in philosophy is overstatement."
"Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise"
"It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious."
"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."
"The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit."
"The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity."
"Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity."
"Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed."
"Everyone is a philosopher. Not everyone is good at it."
"True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason."
"The motive of success is not enough."