Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming . . . and a little mad.

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.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.