E.S. Russell Quotes

Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.

The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

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

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true.

In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.

I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and now.

When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope.

Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.

Change is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical. Change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know

It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children.

Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored

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.