Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.

Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.

Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so may separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.