Bertrand Russell Quotes

The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environments.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death.

...what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?

The belief that personality is mysterious and irreducible has no scientific warrant, and is accepted chiefly because it is flattering to our human self esteem.

...love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one's own ego, and must realize the other's feelings and wishes as though they were one's own.

...His argument, as set out in The Problems of Philosophy, was based on the empirical fact that we are not only aware of things but are also, very frequently, aware of being aware of them.

[T]he infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.

Liberation from the tyranny of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.

Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!

If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians.

For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.

The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.

In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.

The problem of finding a collection of “wise” men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system.

Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.

Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way

Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.

Advocates of capitalism like to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

Where envy is unavoidable it must be used as a stimulus to one’s own efforts, not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.

The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.

Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.

Those who fear life are already three parts dead.

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture.

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

'Change' is scientific 'progress' is ethical change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Man needs for his happiness not only the enjoyment of this or that but hope and enterprise and change.

Every man wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.

To teach how to live with uncertainty yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

The true spirit of delight the exultation the sense of being more than Man which is the touchstone of the highest excellence is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.

What hunger is in relation to food zest is in relation to life.