Bertrand Russell Quotes

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.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

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

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.

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.

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as a means and human folly as an end.

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.

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit. - Octavio Paz The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.

There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man.

My sad conviction is that people can only agree about what they're not really interested in.

A widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results.

What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.

All movements go too far.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.

Televison allows thousands of people to laugh at the same joke and still remain alone.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

dont let the old break you; let the love make you

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.

The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading

Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.