"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution."
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Quote collection
Bertrand Russell quotes (page 9 of 60)
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"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
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"The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long."
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"The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live."
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"Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias."
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"All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy."
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"The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful."
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"It seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it's useful and not because you think it's true."
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"The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately."
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"The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people's secret virtues, but only about their secret vices. Accordingly most gossip is untrue, but care is taken not to verify it. Our neighbour's sins, like the consolations of religion, are so agreeable that we do not stop to scrutinise the evidence closely."
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"I do not believe that science per se is an adequate source of happiness, nor do I think that my own scientific outlook has contributed very greatly to my own happiness, which I attribute to defecating twice a day with unfailing regularity."
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"From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary."
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"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
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"Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them."
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"In the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of the possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact. It is not so that life should be lived."
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"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."
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"We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power."
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"Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless."
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"Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change."
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"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
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