To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.
The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense.
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social Life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.
Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.
It might seem that the empirical philosopher is the slave of his material, but that the pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.
Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.
