On Love:
Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence
On Life:
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale
Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenomenon in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned
On Happiness:
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
The secret of happiness is this: 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.
The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.
On Fear:
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
On Knowledge:
Francis Bacon, a man who rose to eminence by betraying his friends, asserted, no doubt as one of the ripe lessons of experience, that knowledge is power
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power
On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn’t knowledge
On Religion:
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.