Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

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.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.

Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.