Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

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

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.

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