The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world

The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.