Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

My doctor said to me afterwards, 'When you were ill you behaved like a true philosopher. Every time you came to yourself you made a joke.' I never had a compliment that pleased me more.

Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.

What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

My own view on religion is . . . It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and . . . to chronicle eclipses . . . These two services I am prepared to acknowledge.

Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living, or to the world through its outcome.