To create a good philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.
I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, “Good God, what have I said?” and then I knew it was true.
The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms.
Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.
If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.
The more you complain the longer God lets you live.
It’s not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts.
To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.
Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious.
For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy.
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.
In any closet, you can find it, if it is too small, or out of style, or there is just one of it where there should be two.
Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents.
On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn’t knowledge.
Thinking you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.
Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires.
When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder.
Why repeat the old errors, if there are so many new errors to commit?