Bertrand Russell quotes - page 5

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves. (Bertrand Russell)
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. View quote
Bertrand Russell
One must care about a world one will not see. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. View quote
Bertrand Russell
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. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. View quote
Bertrand Russell
When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid. View quote
Bertrand Russell
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. View quote
Bertrand Russell
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it. (Bertrand Russell)
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. View quote
Bertrand Russell
None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear. View quote
Bertrand Russell
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless. View quote
Bertrand Russell
To save the world requires faith and courage faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Envy is the basis of democracy. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos. View quote
Bertrand Russell
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy I mean that if you are happy you will be good. View quote
Bertrand Russell
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. (Bertrand Russell)
Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn. View quote
Bertrand Russell
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. View quote
Bertrand Russell
I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel. View quote
Bertrand Russell
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. View quote
Bertrand Russell