What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

When I was a child ... Only virtue was prized, virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -- that is why they invented hell.

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.

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

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

True happiness for human beings is possible only to those who develop their godlike potentialities to the utmost.

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

In considering irregular appearances, there are certain very natural mistakes which must be avoided.

The Axiom of Choice is necessary to select a set from an infinite number of socks, but not an infinite number of shoes.

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.

One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country. Such men have forgotten what constitutes civilization.

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.