“Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.”

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

The use of self-control is like the use of brakes on the train. It is useful when you find yourself in the wrong direction but merely harmful when the direction is right.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

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

Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end

It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

Peace doesn’t require two people; it requires only one. It has to be you. The problem begins and ends there.

Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end.

Whether you end up convinced or not, you will never think about American national security the same way ever again.

There’s always gonna be people that are scared of it. But at the end of the day you give those bullies, those people, that are so ignorant, if you give them the power to affect you, you’re letting them win

It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.