In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
Common sense is genius in homespun.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
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.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.