Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague and self-contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise and self-consistent.

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.

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

When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.