It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

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

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.