Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

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.

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.

A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us

Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.