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.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

I consider Christianity to be one of the great disasters of the human race... It would be impossible to imagine anything more un - Christianlike than theology.

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake.