Bertrand Russell Quotes

The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence

The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.

Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared.

We may say, in a broad way, that Greek philosophy down to Aristotle expresses the mentality appropriate to the City State; that Stoicism is appropriate to a cosmopolitan despotism; that stochastic philosophy is an intellectual expression of the Church as an organization; that philosophy since Descartes, or at any rate since Locke, tends to embody the prejudices of the commercial middle class; and that Marxism and Fascism are the philosophies appropriate to the modern industrial state.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things : That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.

We must be skeptical even of our skepticism.

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.

A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

We are ... led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call "hard" data and "soft" data. This distinction is a matter of degree, and must not be pressed; but if not taken too seriously it may help to make the situation clear. I mean by "hard" data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by "soft" data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.

Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty... and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love.

What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness. Sometimes a voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful, the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. It is usually the central thing around which their lives are built, and I suppose if they did not live most of their lives in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.

Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be.

The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.

Our beliefs are, however, often contrary to fact.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in the Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.

Love is a little haven of refuge from the world.

But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple.

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

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.

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 flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.

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

We know too much and feel too little.

There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric god. I cannot prove that either the Christian god or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration.

It's coexistence or no existence.

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation do you prefer the grain to the vote?

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

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

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then suchand such another proposition is true of that thing.... Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

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.

Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head.