"Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race."
"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live."
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
"Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age."
"It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."
"To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it."
"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."
"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
"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."
"Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change."
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years."
"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."
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."
"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."
"In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards."
"The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf."
"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."
