Bertrand Russell Quotes

All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties.

When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder.

Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

The more you complain the longer God lets you live

Any philosophy worth taking seriously would have to be built upon a firm foundation of unyielding despair.

The atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination genius and patience as remarkable as any in the history of mankind.

Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.

Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?

Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

We know too much and feel too little.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.

Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within.

Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.

My first advice (on how not to grow old) would be to choose you ancestors carefully.

I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Insight, untested and unsupported, is an uncertain guarantee of the truth.

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

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

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.

Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.

The Axiom of Choice is necessary to select a set from an infinite number of socks, but not an infinite number of shoes.

Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.

If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.

Love is a little haven of refuge from the world.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

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.

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone

The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms

Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.