Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.

I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

There is a possibility in human minds of something mysterious as the night-wind, deep as the sea, calm as the stars, and strong as Death, a mystic contemplation, the “intellectual love of God.” Those who have known it cannot believe in wars any longer, or in any kind of hot struggle. If I could give to others what has come to me in this way, I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it: when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.

You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then suchand such another proposition is true of that thing.... Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.