Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
All movements go too far.
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
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.
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.
Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.
To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.
If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.