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

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.

The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes.

Nature, even in the act of satisfying anticipation, often provides a surprise.

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.