Bertrand Russell Quotes: 45

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

• The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

• Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

• There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

• Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

• Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

  The Conquest of Happiness

• Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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

• I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

• And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

• I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

  Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

• My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

  The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

• Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

  New Hopes for a Changing World

• 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.

  A History of Western Philosophy

• Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

• We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

• Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

  The Impact of Science on Society

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

• Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.

  What I Believe

• Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

• What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

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

• It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

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

  A History of Western Philosophy

• Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.

  Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

• Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

• To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

• 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.

  The Impact of Science on Society

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

  The Problems of Philosophy

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

• It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

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

  The Problems of Philosophy

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

  Our Knowledge of the External World

• To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

• The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

• The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

  A History of Western Philosophy

• Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.

• The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.

  The Problems of Philosophy

• William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

  A History of Western Philosophy

• There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

• La Ciencia en ningún momento está totalmente en lo cierto, pero rara vez está completamente equivocada y tiene en general mayores posibilidades de estar en lo cierto que las teorías no científicas.

• 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.

  Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

• The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages ; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.

  Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy

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

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