Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never.

One of the signs of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Science is what you know, philosophy what you don't know.

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.

This is patently absurd but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress -- though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

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.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the turtle standing on' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the little old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.

To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Fear is, I believe, a most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual--and the soul of a people.

Russel W.: Ahhh! Mithess wahner, ah gah ih ah ma tahn!!! Mrs. Wagner: (without looking up from her grade book) Shut up, Russel. (Russel chewed on an erasable pen too much and it blew up in his mouth.)

(During a conversation about male organs) Joe: I like to think of mine as "Little Joe". Jeff: I call mine Russel. Joe: Russel? Jeff: Russel the Love Muscle.

Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men although he was twice married, it never occured to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.Bertrand Russell

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

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

In order to be happy we require all kinds of supports to our self-esteem. We are human beings, therefore human beings are the purpose of god's creation.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory.

Unless one is taught what to do with success after getting it, achievement of it must inevitably leave him prey to boredom.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

But all who are not lunitics are agreed about certain things: That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than to be a slave. Many people desire these things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

One must care about a world one will not see.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak she gave me a younger brother named Russel, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.