“It seems to me fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.”

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

No one ever gossips about the virtues of others.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.

So far as I can remember there is not one word in the gospels in praise of intelligence.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Love is wise, hatred is foolish.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

I believe that there is a greater power in the world than the evil power of military force, of nuclear bombs — there is the power of good, of morality, of humanitarianism.

She always wanted to believe in things.

I’ve been quiet most of today. By which I mean I can see myself in the mirror; And believe me it is something hard to look at these days.

I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.

I believe all complicated phenomena can be explained by simpler scientific principles.

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.