Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.
Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by sceptics.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.
As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.
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.
Any of us confronted by a forgotten letter written some years ago will be astonished to find how much more foolish our opinions were than we had remembered them as being.
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.
An irrational fear should never be simply let alone, but should be gradually overcome by familiarity with its fainter forms.
An honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid, because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.
