The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.

If you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted iife in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a “new boy" in another.

I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

We are now again in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an “ideology.”.

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren.