The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.

The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable.