The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.

How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

I regard [religion] as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.

I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty.

An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

濒临精神崩溃的症状之一，就是相信自己的工作极其重要。

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.