Quotes from Bertrand Russell

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

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.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

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.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

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.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true

Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know.

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat.

Those who advocate common usage in philosophy sometimes speak in a manner that suggests the mystique of the 'common man.'

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.

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.

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

To teach how to live with uncertainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it.

Education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way

Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike.

Advocates of capitalism like 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.

People are zealous for a cause when they are not quite positive that it is true.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

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.