Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. |
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. |
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. |
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration. |
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. |
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible; we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. |
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. |
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one. |
Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power |
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. |
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out onto the widest vistas. No one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. |
Philosophy is only a matter of passionate vision rather than of logic -- logic only finding reasons for the vision afterwards. |
Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. |
Publishers are demons, there's no doubt about it. |
Religion . . . shall mean for us, the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. |