| It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals. |
| Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform. |
| Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. |
| To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy. |
| We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach. |
| There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. |
| 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. |
| Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. |
| 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. |
| It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. |
| This idea of weapons of mass exterminations utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind. |
| Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never. |
| Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be. |
| Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason ;knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity. |
| The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them. |
| 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. |
| With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. |
| Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. |
| Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities. |
| One must care about a world one will not see. |
| 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. |
| Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion? |
| In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. |
| Sin is geographical. |
| So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. |
| The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men. |
| We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness. |
| To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead. |
| Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution. |
| Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. |
| Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man. |
| Thoughts is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. |
| Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should. |
| Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age. |
| 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. |
| The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. |
| The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. |
| I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity. |
| For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience. |
| I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible. |
| The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good. |
| Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias. |
| The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. |
| To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead. |
| Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. |
| 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 understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name. |
| The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. |
| If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it. |
| If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. |
| 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. |
| We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. |
| Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. |
| Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth more than ruin, more even than death. |
| The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. |
| We must care about the world of our children and grandchildren, a world we may never see. |
| To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. |
| We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life. |
| Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact. |
| Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. |
| A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it. |
| A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short. |
| 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. |
| All movements go too far. |
| Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. |
| Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept. |
| Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. |
| Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. |
| Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd. |
| Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race. |
| Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves. |
| Drunkenness is temporary suicide. |
| Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery. |
| 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. |
| I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return. |
| I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy. |
| 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. |
| 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 would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. |
| 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. |
| In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors. |
| It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion. |
| It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. |
| Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy. |
| Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like. |
| Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim. |
| 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. |
| Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy. |
| Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. |
| Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. |
| No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. |
| None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear. |
| Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. |
| Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know. |
| The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe. |
| The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts. |
| The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. |
| The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd. |
| The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. |
| The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history. |
| The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. |
| The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. |
| The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation. |
| The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. |
| The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours. |
| The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. |
| Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. |
| What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite. |
| When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself. |
