Bertrand Russell Quotes

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

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

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.

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

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.

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

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

Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

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.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

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.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

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

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

Sin is geographical.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

Advocates of capitalism are very apt 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."

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

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

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.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

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.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

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.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

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.

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.

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

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

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

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.

One must care about a world one will not see.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

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

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

All human activity is prompted by desire.

what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

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

The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

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

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

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.

Some people would rather die than think.

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

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.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

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.

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.

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

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

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

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.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

All movements go too far.

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

All forms of fear produce fatigue.

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Throughout the long period of religious doubt, I had been rendered very unhappy by the gradual loss of belief, but when the process was completed, I found to my surprise that I was quite glad to be done with the whole subject.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

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.

What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

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.

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.

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, a larger portion of fear than they should.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

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.

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

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.

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.