Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Ideas won't keep, something must be done about them.
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Common sense is genius in homespun.
Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes. Rather the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
In every age of well-marked transition, there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't 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.
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Philosophy is the product of wonder.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
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.
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.