"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."

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

"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 most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."

"I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds."

"Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce 'proofs' of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors - Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' - but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions."

"I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy."

"War grows out of ordinary human nature."

"The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments."

"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."

"Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like."

"Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities."

"Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."

"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."

"Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way."

"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."

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

"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."

"Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."

"Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness it is a sign of emotional failure."

"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."

"If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect."

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."

"The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system."

"When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man."

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."

"In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good."

"To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy."

"We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and the other which we practice but seldom preach."

"All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?"

"In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch."

"Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture."

"Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept."

"In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded."

"The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty."

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

"Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time."

"Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning."

"I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them."

"Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy."

"...what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?"

"Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live."

"Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possiblities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what the may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familar things in an unfamilar aspect."

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."

"Drunkenness is temporary suicide."

"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."

"I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery."

"Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!"

"I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and now."

"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics."