The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

The doctrine (of) maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy . . . I find myself totally unable to accept . . . . Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.