Quotes from Bertrand Russell

Affection cannot be created; it can only be liberated.

I often long to . . . give up my life to love of my neighbour. This is really a temptation.

The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.

I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, "Good God, what have I said?" and then I knew it was true.

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

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

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

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

What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.

We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.

The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.

The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

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

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly, I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.

To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

The true spirit of delight, the exultation, 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.

To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.