"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
"Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, Wisdom the source of virtue, and of fame, Obtained with labor, for mankind employed, And then, when most you share it, best enjoyed."
"Religion is what a person does in his solitariness."
"Seek simplicity but distrust it."
"Seek simplicity but distrust it."
"There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain."
"An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it."
"The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new development."
"Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up."
"We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought."
"To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought."
"Adventure of Ideas (1933) pt. 4, ch. 16 There aro no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."
"The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future."
"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
"Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them."
"So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century."
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
"It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts. But until this has occurred, words do not count. - from Science and the Modern World"
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
"It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications."
"Every really new idea looks crazy at first."
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
"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 details."