Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture.
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
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.
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.
I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doct...
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.
Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.
If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.
I am sometimes shocked by the blasphemies of those who think themselves pious--for instance, the nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can se...
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.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.