Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious.
The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.
What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.
There have been poverty, pestilence, and famine, which were due to man's inadequate mastery of nature. There have been wars, oppressions and tortures which have been due to men's hostility to their fellow men.
A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.
I don't care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.
Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.
The teacher, like the artist, the philosopher, and the man of letters, can only perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.
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.
Drunkeness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.
I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.
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
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.
The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others.
The Ten Commandments should be headed like an examination paper: No more than six to be attempted.
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