Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
— Bertrand Russell
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 fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
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.
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'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.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
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.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Sin is geographical.
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
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.
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.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
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, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
