In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

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

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.