Bertrand Russell Quotes

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

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.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

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.

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

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

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

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.

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

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.