I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.
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.
My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.
Love cannot exists as a duty; to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse.
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
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.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
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.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
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.
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.