I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

Diversity is essential to happiness and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social systems.

One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.

Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye.

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.

Protagoras did not know if the gods exist, but he held in any case they ought to be worshiped. Philosophy, according to him, had nothing edifying to teach, and for the survival of morals we must rely upon the thoughtlessness of the majority and their willingness to believe what they had been taught.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.