I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.
Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion.
I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.
A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it almost seem like a live teacher.
If two hitherto rival football teams, under the influence of brotherly love, decided to co-operate in placing the football first beyond one goal and then beyond the other, no one’s happiness would be increased.
Organized people are just too lazy to look for things.
Ants and savages put strangers to death.
In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.
I have sought love because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven the saints and poets have imagined.
No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.
All forms of fear produce fatigue.
The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.
There can’t be a practical reason for believing something that is not true.
Even if we could be certain that one of the world’s religions were perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.
I know a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found he was planting trees in his garden.
At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine.