Quotes from Bertrand Russell

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

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

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.

In the ordinary business of life punctuality is . . . necessary.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale

Brief and powerless is man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage. It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the second chance were offered me.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren.

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

To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

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

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

Teachers are more than any other group the guardians of civilization.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.