The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".

[Children] are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.

The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.

A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.

I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal.

If human beings could be propagated by cutting, like apple trees, aristocracy would be biologically sound.

And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.