"I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work."
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Bertrand Russell quotes (page 2 of 60)
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"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
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"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."
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"Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd."
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"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
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"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
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"We may define "faith" as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups, substitute different emotions."
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"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it."
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"Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give."
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"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
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"You must believe that you can help bring about a better world."
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"The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible."
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"Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power."
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"Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken."
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"To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom."
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"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead."
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"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
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"Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position."
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"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."
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"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."
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