The Best Bertrand Russell quotes

We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love. — Bertrand Russell

Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion that I possess. — Bertrand Russell

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love. — Bertrand Russell

Love is a little haven of refuge from the world. — Bertrand Russell

To fear love is to fear life. — Bertrand Russell

The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake. — Bertrand Russell

Wealth can often purchase not only the semblance of love but its reality. This is unjust and undesirable but nonetheless a fact. — Bertrand Russell

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy. — Bertrand Russell

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens. — Bertrand Russell

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life. — Bertrand Russell

One is always a little afraid of love, but above all, one is afraid of pain or causing pain. — Bertrand Russell

Love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one’s own ego, and must realize the other’s feelings and wishes as though they were one’s own. — Bertrand Russell

Love cannot exists as a duty; to tell a child that it ought to love its parents and its brother and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse. — Bertrand Russell

It’s easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you. — Bertrand Russell

Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached. — Bertrand Russell

One must care about a world one will not see. — Bertrand Russell

In a just world, there would be no possibility of ‘charity’. — Bertrand Russell

The saviors of the world, society’s last hope. — Bertrand Russell

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational. — Bertrand Russell

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

War can only be abolished by the establishment of a world government. — Bertrand Russell

We ought to look the world frankly in the face. — Bertrand Russell

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

What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry. — Bertrand Russell

A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value. — Bertrand Russell

The trouble with The world is that The stupid are cocksure and The intelligent are full of doubt. — Bertrand Russell

You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. — Bertrand Russell

There is no such thing as matter at all, and that the world consists of nothing but minds and their ideas. Hylas — Bertrand Russell

How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? — Bertrand Russell

No great achievement is possible without persistent work. — Bertrand Russell

The axiomatic method has many advantages over honest work. — Bertrand Russell

Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work. — Bertrand Russell

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort. — Bertrand Russell

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. — Bertrand Russell

Stupidity and unconscious bias often work more damage than venality. — Bertrand Russell

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important. — Bertrand Russell

One’s work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days. — Bertrand Russell

The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. — Bertrand Russell

I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work. — Bertrand Russell

Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. — Bertrand Russell

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

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. — Bertrand Russell

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. — Bertrand Russell

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness. — Bertrand Russell

The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. — Bertrand Russell

How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race. — Bertrand Russell

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy. — Bertrand Russell

Look at me. Look at me is one of the fundamental desires of human heart. — Bertrand Russell

Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. — Bertrand Russell

War grows out of ordinary human nature. — Bertrand Russell

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race. — Bertrand Russell

In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. — Bertrand Russell

The free intellect is the chief engine of human progress. — Bertrand Russell

Moral progress has consisted in the main of protest against cruel customs, and of attempts to enlarge human sympathy. — Bertrand Russell

Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as a means and human folly as an end. — Bertrand Russell

Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias. — Bertrand Russell

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. — Bertrand Russell

Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety. — Bertrand Russell

Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. — Bertrand Russell

It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know–or care–about circumstances in the colonies. — Bertrand Russell

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it’s easy to have glory without power. — Bertrand Russell

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. — Bertrand Russell

If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so? — Bertrand Russell

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. — Bertrand Russell

Self–respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him. — Bertrand Russell

When two great powers disagree about anything–it doesn’t matter what–they must find a way to settle it somehow by arbitration or by negotiation, not by war or threat of war. — Bertrand Russell

In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias. — Bertrand Russell

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. — Bertrand Russell

The . . . increase in the power of officials is a constant source of irritation to everybody else. — Bertrand Russell

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

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. — Bertrand Russell

The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique. — Bertrand Russell

The power of thought, the vast regions it can master. — Bertrand Russell

To realize the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom. — Bertrand Russell

To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement. — Bertrand Russell

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. — Bertrand Russell

From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary. — Bertrand Russell

All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties. — Bertrand Russell

Writing can be either readable or precise, but not at the same time. — Bertrand Russell

Not all superstitions are dark and cruel. I once received a communication from the god Osiris. He was living at that time in a suburb of Boston. — Bertrand Russell

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. — Bertrand Russell

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

Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time. — Bertrand Russell

My doctor said to me afterwards, ‘When you were ill you behaved like a true philosopher. Every time you came to yourself you made a joke.’ I never had a compliment that pleased me more. — 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. — Bertrand Russell

A million million years gives us some time to prepare for the end . . . let us make the best of it. — Bertrand Russell

Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don’t know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery. — Bertrand Russell

A certain amount of boredom is…essential to a happy life — Bertrand Russell

The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. — Bertrand Russell

In the ordinary business of life punctuality is . . . necessary. — Bertrand Russell

The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes. — Bertrand Russell

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. — Bertrand Russell

Human nature being what it is, people will insist upon getting some pleasure out of life. — Bertrand Russell

Life is just one cup of coffee after another, and don’t look for anything else. — Bertrand Russell

To think I have spent my life on absolute muck. — Bertrand Russell

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

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim. — Bertrand Russell

To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it. — Bertrand Russell

I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds. — Bertrand Russell

The whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. — 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 can live. — Bertrand Russell

Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible. — Bertrand Russell

Having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. — Bertrand Russell

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. — Bertrand Russell

Knowledge, as opposed to fantasies of wish fulfilment, is difficult to come by. — Bertrand Russell

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts. — Bertrand Russell

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination. — Bertrand Russell

Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge. — Bertrand Russell

All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left. — Bertrand Russell

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. — Bertrand Russell

I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery. . . I am quite willing to believe that anything in deductive logic can be done by machinery. — Bertrand Russell

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. — Bertrand Russell

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. — Bertrand Russell

I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. — Bertrand Russell

The whiter my hair becomes, the more ready people are to believe what I say. — Bertrand Russell

Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety. — Bertrand Russell

Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts. — Bertrand Russell

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. — Bertrand Russell