Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man
To choose one sock from each of infinitely many pairs of socks requires the Axiom of Choice, but for shoes the Axiom is not needed.
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
There was a law in Connecticut - I believe it is still formally unrepealed - making it illegal for a man to kiss his wife on Sunday.
Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.
Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate.
Calculating machines do sums better than even the cleverest people… As arithmetic has grown easier, it has come to be less respected.
I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.
It will be found, as men grow more tolerant in their instincts, that many uniformities now insisted upon are useless and even harmful.
The discipline in your life should be one determined by your own desires and your own needs, not put upon you by society or authority.
In mass cruelty, the expulsions of Germans ordered by the Russians fall not very far short of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.
Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?
The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse.
One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
One eminently orthodox Catholic divine laid it down that a confessor may fondle a nun's breasts, provided he does it without evil intent.
Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
Who ever heard a theologian preface his creed, or a politician conclude his speech with an estimate of the probable error of his opinion?
Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.
When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.
The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms
The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.
We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative.
It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.
The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more amazing becomes what human beings have achieved.
Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.
The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability.
And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence
Love cannot exists as a duty; to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse.