1. “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.”
2. “Advertising is legalized lying.”
3. ”After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.”
4. “And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”
5. “Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.”
6. “But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one thing dreadful.”
7. “Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.”
8. “Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.”
9. “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
10. “Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.”
11. “Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.”
12. “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
13. “Human history in essence is the history of ideas.”
14. “Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.”
15. “Ideals are not the easiest possessions to have and manage, and they may even rise to the level of serious inconveniences.”
16. “It is easier to hate animate than inanimate things, Animals more than plants, and one's fellow men more completely than any animals.”
17. ”It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.”
18. “It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.”
19. “Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”
20. “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
21. “Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.”
22. “New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, ``Why then are you not taking part in them?''”
23. "No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."
24. “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.”
25. "One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good."
26. “Our true nationality is mankind.”
27. “Rights and laws and regulations and rascalities: it's like a game of spelicans.”
28. “Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room -- in moments of devotion, a temple -- and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated -- darkness still.”
29. “Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses, she hides in strange places.”
30. “She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.”
31. “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.”
32. “The crazy combative patriotism that plainly threatens to destroy civilization is very largely begotten by the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress in their history lessons. They take the growing mind at a naturally barbaric phase and they inflame and fix its barbarism.”
33. “The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”
34. “The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”
35. "The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
36. “There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.”
37. “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
38. "There will come a day...one day in an endless succession of days, when man shall stand upon this earth as upon a footstool. And shall laugh and cast out his hands amongst the stars..."
39. "The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by."
40. “The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.”
41. “The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.”
42. “They were of course quite undistinguished-looking men, as indeed all true Scientists are.”
43. “To you literature is an end, to me, literature, like architecture, is a means, it has a use.”
44. “True Brotherhood is universal brotherhood.”
45. “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough – as many wrong theories are!”
46. “We're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.”
47. "We have writing and teaching, science and power; we have tamed the beasts and schooled the lightning... but we have still to tame ourselves."
48. ”We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.”
49. “We were making the future, he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!”
50. “While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.”
51. "Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again."
