The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.