Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned.
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.