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

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.

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.

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.

You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.

It is at the time of spiritual wilderness experience that the devil begins to remind us about the past

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

Once you stay open, it's incredible what starts unfolding.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.

I never thought about getting any tattoos removed.

I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

When the position is such that neither side will gain by making the first move, it is called temporising ground.

I can't believe the ignorance there, so I don't allow it to affect my life, I don't allow it to come into my zone, and it's not in my world, really.