People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.

European travellers find the Japanese a smiling race.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.