Bertrand Russell Quotes
The very best proof that something can be done is that someone has already done it.
The Ten Commandments should be headed like an examination paper: No more than six to be attempted.
Unhappy business men, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.
A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.
Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.
You could live without the opera singer, but not without the services of the baker. On this ground you might say that the baker performs a greater service; but no lover of music would agree.
Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else.
I know a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found he was planting trees in his garden.
If the Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to the influence of those who attacked the Church
Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity: To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.
I often long to . . . give up my life to love of my neighbour. This is really a temptation.
To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.
The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.
Most political leaders acquire their position by causing large numbers of people to believe that these leaders are actuated by altruistic desires
Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.
This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.
If one lived for ever the joys of life would inevitably in the end lose their savour. As it is, they remain perennially fresh.
I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, "Good God, what have I said?" and then I knew it was true.
Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.
Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable.
