Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.