Continued Insights from Bertrand Russell

"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 process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known"

"To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name"

"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"

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

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

"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"

"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so"

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

"Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities"

"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"

"Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction"

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

"No one gossips about other people's secret virtues"

"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power"

"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"

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

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

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

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

"Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform"

"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"

"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 seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals"

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

"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"

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

"Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires"

"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"

"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 all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted"

"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"

"If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all"

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

"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"

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom"

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time"

"The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men"

"The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour"

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

"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"

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

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

"The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe"

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

"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"

"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 hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it"

"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"

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Inspiring Quotes by Bertrand Russell - Page 2