.

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

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow
sharper.
  
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
 
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that
they want their children to be a credit to them.
 
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
 
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.
 
Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense
companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has
to give.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the
absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
 
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

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

happiness.
  
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
 
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one
of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
 
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of
the fact.

 
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge
of the facts.
 
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true
happiness.

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily
respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very
much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account
value him less.
 
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that,
but hope and enterprise and change.
 
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever
that it is not utterly absurd.
 
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred
than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
 
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.

 
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
 
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
 
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.
 
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources
of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
 
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.
 
Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of
power.
 
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
 
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three
parts dead.

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.
 
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.
 
Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible,
Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and
comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
 
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted
was once eccentric.
 
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for
their country.
 
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the
unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
 
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.
 
Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
 
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.
 
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the
belief that one's work is terribly important.
 
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make
the gloomiest person happy.
 
Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant
magistrate.
 
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's
happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
 
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and
aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
 
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity
toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
 
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
 
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.
 
Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits
of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable
activities.
 
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
 
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention,
largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of
themselves.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
 
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is
nevertheless an intellectual vice.
 
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.
 
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.
 
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which
adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
 
Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which
we are aware is called a concept.
 
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.
 
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests
that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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 pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some
specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the
exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.
 
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have
the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is
asked to die is an unworthy one.
 
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself
secure.
 
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which
not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
 
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.
 
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are
more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the
distorting medium of their own desires.
 
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is
no good evidence either way.
 
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.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the
earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to
do so.
 
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.
 
I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our
private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in
philosophy.
 
Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
 
Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you
like.
 
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as
catalogues and encyclopedias.
 
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.
 
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.
 
Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have
fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to
keep her mouth open while he counted.
 
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier
centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most
spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
 
No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not
matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The
real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?
 
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.
 
All movements go too far.

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.
 
The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something
transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of
life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.
 
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
 
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who
cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
 
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.
 
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
 
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment
based upon it.
 
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.
 
Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of
mankind are caused by the fear of it.
 
Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to
the realization of desires.
 
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.
 
It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled
for in a form which destroys their ideals.
 
Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary
analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical
at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word,
logical.
 
I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can
start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you
can, as you go along.
 
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in
preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the
acquisition of power.
 
To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the
citizens of a democracy.
 
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same
sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
 
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is
really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone
upon himself.
 
Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.
 
Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the
victim.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of

which it is a name.
 
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been
searching for evidence which could support this.
 
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small
one, particularly if he plays golf.
 
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 infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to
moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
 
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
 
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices
required for cooperation with oneself.
 
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular
to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because,
like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it
will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
 
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
prevents us from living freely and nobly.
 
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
 
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.
 
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in
praise of intelligence.
 
Sin is geographical.
 
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which
is the exact opposite.
 
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.
 
Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything
worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this
respect my travels were very useful to me.
 
Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get
the blame.