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Bertrand Russell

484 quotes

• “No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dreams and Facts (1919)

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

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Lecture I, Current Tendencies, p. 11 (New American Library edition, 1960)

• “The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We are thus 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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars" – such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things – and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 civilized men.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A process which led from the amœba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amœba would agree with this opinion is not known.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In science men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know—it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Formerly, it was held by philosophers and mathematicians alike that the proofs in Geometry depended on the figure; nowadays, this is known to be false. In the best books there are no figures at all. The reasoning proceeds by the strict rules of formal logic from a set of axioms laid down to begin with.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalisation would be just as well founded as the generalisation which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[T]he plan we are advocating amounts essentially to this: that a certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all, whether they work or not, and that a larger income, as much larger as might be warranted by the total amount of commodities produced, should be given to those who are willing to engage in some work which the community recognizes as useful.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[Freedom] is the greatest of political goods. I do not say freedom is the greatest of all goods: the best things come from within—they are such things as creative art, and love, and thought. Such things can be helped or hindered by political conditions, but not actually produced by them; and freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Government by majorities can be made less oppressive by devolution, by placing the decision of questions primarily affecting only a section of the community in the hands of that section, rather than of a Central Chamber. In this way, men are no longer forced to submit to decisions made in a hurry by people mostly ignorant of the matter in hand and not personally interested.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.”

  Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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