What men want is not knowledge but certainty.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Beggars do not envy millionaires though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however,...
Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness it is a sign of emotional failure.
To teach how to live with uncertainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it.
Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.
Those who fear life are already three parts dead.
The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.
Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society
Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture.
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
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.