"I feel as if one would only discover on one's death bed what one ought to have lived for"
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Bertrand Russell quotes (page 57 of 60)
1.2K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every increase in knowledge requires an increase in wisdom"
Read quote
3 likes
"Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials."
Read quote
3 likes
"The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause."
Read quote
3 likes
"Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history ; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death , and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts."
Read quote
3 likes
"The camera is as subjective as we are."
Read quote
3 likes
"No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery."
Read quote
3 likes
"When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection."
Read quote
3 likes
"I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon , at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila , but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims."
Read quote
3 likes
"One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome."
Read quote
3 likes
"In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative."
Read quote
3 likes
"The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think, and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is impossible to read in America, except on a train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night."
Read quote
3 likes
"Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events."
Read quote
3 likes
"With civilized men..., it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious."
Read quote
3 likes
"There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead."
Read quote
3 likes
"For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy"
Read quote
3 likes
"Emphatic and reiterated assertion, especially during childhood, produces in most people a belief so firm as to have a hold even over the unconscious."
Read quote
3 likes
"To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it."
Read quote
3 likes
"He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains. And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man."
Read quote
3 likes