“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.”

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.

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

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one’s existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

The greatest romance is with the Infinite. You have no idea how beautiful life can be. When you suddenly find God everywhere, when He comes and talks to you and guides you, the romance of divine love has begun.

When you stroll through Munich it can happen that you suddenly stand in front of an old house, an idyllically-dreaming church that smiles like a friendly anachronism into our modern time.

Zidane was from another planet. When Zidane stepped onto the pitch, the 10 other guys just got suddenly better. It is that simple.

and my worries all of a sudden seemed to float above me a gentle yet certain release that I am someone who is easy to love

It’s not the pace of life I mind. It’s the sudden stop at the end.

For women, the best way to defend is to attack, and the best way to attack is a sudden and inexplicable retreat.

You pull away and suddenly I have more room to grow.

The meaning of life has suddenly appeared in the spark of her eyes.