Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
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.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
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.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
being good, knowledge, life & love
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.