No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the … - George Santayana

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.