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.
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money. and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.
What we call "progress" is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.
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.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
