Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

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.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.