Our use of the phrase 'The Dark Ages' to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. [...] From India to Spain, the brilliant civilisation of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilisation, but quite the contrary. [...] To us it seems that West-European civilisation is civilisation, but this is a narrow view.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

[There has been] every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

Neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?

Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.