It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.