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

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.

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Is there any knowledge in the world that is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Books, the children of the brain.

The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty, and symmetry, little by little, as it graduallly comes to be more and more unfolded, or displayed.

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

For out of old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn from year to year; And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all this new science that men learn.

The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible.

Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.