Quote collection
294 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The known is finite, the unknown infinite; spiritually we find ourselves on a tiny island in the middle of a boundless ocean of the inexplicable. It is our task, from generation to generation, to drain a small amount of additional land."
"I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy."
"The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect."
"No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man."
"Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization"
"Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation."
"The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals."
"In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is-Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily."
"I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men"
"I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'."
"Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
"The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false."
"Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe."
"The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses."
"No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life."
"Man's Place in Nature."
"The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing."
"Veracity is the heart of morality."
"The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher."
"Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual."