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.

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

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

After you understand about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.

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.

Peace is self-control at its widest-at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality.

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.