The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

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

Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy.

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.

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.