No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.
Alfred North Whitehead
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.
There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.
Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
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.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
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.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Common sense is genius in homespun.
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
