Selected Quotes By Bertrand Russell
"Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know."
Bertrand Russell, Science, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Sin is geographical."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."
Bertrand Russell, Science
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
Bertrand Russell, Happiness
"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."
Bertrand Russell, Happiness
"When considering marriage one should ask oneself this question; 'will I be able to talk with this person into old age?' Everything else is transitory, the most time is spent in conversation."
Bertrand Russell, Life, Love
"The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
Bertrand Russell, Life, Love, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Life, Love
"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The secret of happiness is this: let your interest be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons who interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."
Bertrand Russell, Happiness
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Anger and Fighting, Life
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Science
"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 paradise in a few years."
Bertrand Russell, Happiness, Kindness
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately."
Bertrand Russell, Belief, Government
"So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own."
Bertrand Russell, Life, Happiness, Love
"These illustrations suggest four general maxims: The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
The second is: don't over-estimate your own merits.
The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.
And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible."
Bertrand Russell, Life, Happiness
"As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways."
Bertrand Russell, Life, Happiness
"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom, Power
"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Love, Life
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."
Bertrand Russell, Wealth
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you."
Bertrand Russell, Love
"The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
Bertrand Russell, Belief, Intelligence/Wisdom
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important."
Bertrand Russell, Arrogance
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Government
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Love
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
Bertrand Russell, Life
"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."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."
Bertrand Russell, Belief
"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead."
Bertrand Russell, Love, Life
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
Bertrand Russell, Love, Happiness
"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
Bertrand Russell, Intelligence/Wisdom
"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."