A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

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

General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.

Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.