We must be skeptical even of our skepticism.
The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.
If we spent half an hour every day in silent immobility, I am convinced that we should conduct all our affairs, personal, national, and international, far more sanely than we do at present.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.
The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.
HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.
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.
All human activity is prompted by desire.
One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.
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.
It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.
No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.
To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: what are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe, but look only and surely at what are the facts.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.
Fervent religious believers sacrifice pleasures of the body, but instead enjoy pleasures of the mind, including the joy of knowing that those men who didn't follow their religion would be tortured for eternity.
Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.
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