The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.

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

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.