Without adventure civilization is in full decay.- Alfred North Whitehead
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
When you are average, you are just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas would not keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.
The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
