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

Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.

A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts that could not exist without it.

The secret of happiness is very simple: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

One must care about a world one will not see.

To write a tragedy, a man must feel the tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.

The demand for certainty is one that is natural to man but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.

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

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.