Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.

It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

Common sense is genius in homespun.