When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; 'will I be able to talk with this person into old age?' Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation.

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge

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.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

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.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interest be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons who interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

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.

Sin is geographical.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.

So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

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 paradise in a few years.

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

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.

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.

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.