You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.

To come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure.

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.