A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray. |
Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing. |
Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis. |
If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth. |
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way. |
It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination. |
The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite. |
The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product. |
The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. . . . A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship. |
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. |
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. |
The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer. |
The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. |
There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself. |
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it. |