The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth-while.

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth.

Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.