All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.

This splendid subject [mathematics], queen of all exact sciences, and the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden... The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.

Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development.

Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.