Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays Quotes

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know – it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

A process which led from the amoeba to Man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.