Bertrand Russell

“Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.”

“There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.”

“The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”

“Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.”

“وقتی این همه اشتباهات جدید وجود دارد که می توان مرتکب شد، چرا باید همان قدیمی ها را تکرار کرد”

“We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice, but seldom preach.”

“No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.”

“How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.”

“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”

“Man needs, for his happiness, not merely the enjoyment of this or that, but hope, and enterprise and change.”

“Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.”

“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.”

“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 in poetry.”

“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”

“Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

“Sin is geographical.”

“Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

“The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.”

“So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”

“Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.”

“This [Hegel's philosophy] illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.”

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

“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.”

“The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge”

“Kita tidak bisa menjamin kesejahteraan kita, kecuali dengan menjamin kesejahteraan orang-orang lain juga.Jika anda bahagia, anda harus rela mengusahakan orang-orang lain agar bahagia pula.”

“Rahasia kebahagiaan adalah, biarkan minat anda berkembang seluas mungkin.Dan biarkan reaksi anda pada orang-orang dan benda-benda yang menarik perhatian anda bersifat bersahabat, bukan memusuhi.”

“a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”

“Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.”

“a certain amount of boredom is...essential to a happy life”

“If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.”

“A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...”

“I think that in all descriptions of the good life here on earth we must assume a certain basis of animal vitality and animal instinct; without this, life becomes tame and uninteresting. Civilization should be something added to this, not substituted for it; the ascetic saint and the detached sage fail in this respect to be complete human beings. A small number of them may enrich a community; but a world composed of them would die of boredom.”

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interest be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons who interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. ”

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”

“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”

“And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence”

“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”

“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.”

“Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.”

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

“From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be - Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity - to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.”

“There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”

“A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink.I feel I shall find the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too stupid to understand—fussing about medicines instead of searching for wisdom.I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.”

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

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

“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. ”

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.”

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

“Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.”