There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interest of the desire to know.

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

The saviors of the world, society's last hope.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

The practice of inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to civilized life, makes mistakes easier, by preventing experience of the actions to which a desire would otherwise lead, and by often causing the inhibited impulses themselves to be unnoticed or quickly forgotten.

Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.