The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

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

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

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.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

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

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

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

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

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

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

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

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

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

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

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.

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.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

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.

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

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.

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.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

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

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

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.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

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.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.