132 quotes
It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)
In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
The Aims of Education (1929)
A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an opportunity.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
Intolerance is the besetting sin of moral fervour.
Adventures of Ideas (1933)
The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1+1=2.
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.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
My criticism of [Hegel's] procedure is that when in his discussion he arrives at a contradiction, he construes it as a crisis in the universe.
Men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
The Aims of Education (1929)
Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
Philosophy is the product of wonder. The effort after the general characterization of the world around us is the romance of human thought.
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.
Science and the Modern World (1925)
The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anesthesia.
Adventures of Ideas (1933)
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)