Famous Quotes

Quotes by Bertrand Russell

• A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.
• A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
• A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.
• Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
• Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
• Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
• Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
• 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.
• 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.
• Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
• Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
• Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
• Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
• Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
• Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
• Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
• Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
• Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
• Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.
• Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
• I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
• I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
• I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
• I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
• I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
• 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.
• If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
• In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.
• 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.
• It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
• Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
• Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.
• Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.