The use of self control is like the use of brakes on train. It is useful when you find yourself in wrong direction but merely harmful when the direction is right

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Experience has taught me a technique for dealing with such people [...] I counter the devotees of the Great Pyramid by adoration of the Sphinx; and the devotee of nuts by pointing out that hazelnuts and walnuts are as deleterious as other foods and only Brazil nuts should be tolerated. But when I was younger I had not yet acquired this technique, with the result that my contacts with cranks were sometimes alarming.

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.