"Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure."
Read quote
10 likes
Quote collection
Bertrand Russell quotes (page 16 of 60)
1.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded."
Read quote
10 likes
"Are you never afraid of God's judgement in denying him? Most certainly not. I also deny Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and Brahma, but this causes me no qualms. I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. 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."
Read quote
10 likes
"No one gossips about other people's secret virtues."
Read quote
10 likes
"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."
Read quote
10 likes
"One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished."
Read quote
10 likes
"These illustrations suggest four general maxims[...]. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don't over-estimate your own merits. The third is: don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you."
Read quote
10 likes
"Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day."
Read quote
10 likes
"Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free."
Read quote
10 likes
"Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species."
Read quote
10 likes
"The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied."
Read quote
10 likes
"Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate."
Read quote
10 likes
"Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."
Read quote
10 likes