“Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.”

I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.

If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

Even logical positivists are capable of love.

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis – about the meaning of what we say – and there is all of this … all of life.

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a ‘reality’transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Theism is so confused and the sentences in which “God” appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.

A good man’s life is all of a piece.

A good man may fall, but he falls like a ball [and rebounds]; the ignoble man falls like a lump of clay.

Heaven prepares good men with crosses; but no ill can happen to a good man.

Good men but see death, the wicked taste it.

If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man’s being a good poet without first being a good man.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.