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.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

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 great importance.

But they love each other. Isn't that what love means? That you're supposed to be there for the other person to turn to, no matter what?

You can just about always stand more 'n you think you can.

Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.

A feeling of continuous growth is a wonderful source of motivation and self confidence.

I would not trade America's position in the world - our ledger, our debts and assets - for any country in the world. There isn't a country in the world even close to America.

The very fact that the youthful soul feels insecure strengthens its active aspiration to master its insecurity.

Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations, we free ourselves from the past.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

Books are often far more than just books.

My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.