Nicholas Murray Butler Quotes

This was the penn'worth of his thought.

Optimism is essential to achievement and is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

To swallow gudgeons ere they're catch'd And count their chickens ere they're hatch'd.

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and of true progress.

Necessity does the work of courage.

Optimism is the foundation of courage.

A degenerate nobleman or one that is proud of his birth is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.