"To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it"
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead"
"I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along"
"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf"
"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom"
"Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy"
"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country"
"Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives"
"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so"
"The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics"
"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery"
"Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free"
"I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite"
"I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy"
"None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear"
"Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one"
"I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine"
"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world"
"To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy"
"Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires"
"There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths"
"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny"
"Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race"
"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd"
"Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom"
"Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it"
"Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept"
"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths"
"Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted"
"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness"
"All movements go too far"
"Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me"
"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate"
"Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age"
"A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is"
"A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation"
"A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known"
"Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance"
"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric"
"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 poetry"
"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live"
"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it"
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence"
"Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical"
"Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself"
"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know"
"Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities"
"Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic"
"Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction"
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines"
