Next to worry probably one of the most potent causes of unhappiness is envy.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.

The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense