Bertrand Russell
637 quotes
Biography
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was an English philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He influenced mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.
"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."
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?"
"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."
"Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning."