The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?

The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to philosophers is very recent.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists - that is why they invented hell.

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.

The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.