Philosophy asks the simple question, What is it all about? (Phil. Rev. p. 178)

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding. (M.T. p.232)

Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicity into its trains of reasoning. (S.M.W. p. 11)

Philosophy is not a mere collection of noble sentiments. A deluge of such sentiments does more harm than good. ... It is not - or, at least, should not be - a ferocious debate between irritable professors. It is a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities. In philosophy, the fact, the theory, the alternatives, and the ideal, are weighed together. Its gifts are insight and foresight, and a sense of the worth of life, in short, that sense of importance which nerves all civilised effort. Mankind can flourish in the lower stages of life with merely barbaric flashes of thought. But when civilisation culminates, the absence of a co-ordinating philosophy of life, spread throughout the community, spells decadence, boredom, and the slackening of effort. (A.I. p. 125)

If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent. (S.M.W. p.x.)

The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace. (M.T. p. 237)

The philosophic attitude is a resolute attempt to enlarge the understanding of the scope of application of every notion which enters into our current thought. The philosophic attempt takes every word, and every phrase, in the verbal expression of thought, and asks, What does it mean? It refuses to be satisfied by the conventional presupposition that every sensible person knows the answer. As soon as you rest satisfied with primitive ideas, and with primitive propositions, You have ceased to be a philosopher. (M.T. p. 234)

Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, refashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and - so far as may be - efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests. (S.M.W. pp. ix-x)

Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations. By providing the generic notions philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances which rest unrealised in the womb of nature. (P.R. p. 26)

The philosophy of science is the endeavour to formulate the most general characters of things observed. These sought-for characters are to be no fancy characters of a fairy tale enacted behind the scenes. They must be observed characters of things observed. (Princ. Rel. p. 5)

We must not expect simple answers to far-reaching questions. However far our gaze penetrates, there are always heights beyond which block our vision. (P.R. p. 519)

Things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal. (P.R. p. 63)

It is the foundation of the metaphysical position which I am maintaining that the understanding of actuality requires a reference to ideality. (S.M.W. p. 228)