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

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3 parts dead.

It’s easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of great fear.

Your writing is never as good as you hoped, but never as bad as you feared.

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.

The spirituality of wonder knows the world is charged with grace, that while sin and war, disease and death are terribly real, God’s loving presence and power in our midst are even more real.

It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.

After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.

If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there… When nothing new can get in, that’s death.

Love lives. and dies. as fast as butterflies.

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.