Top 500 Bertrand Russell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

52. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

53. “Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.”

— Bertrand Russell

54. “Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it.”

— Bertrand Russell

55. “It’s not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts.”

— Bertrand Russell

56. “Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.”

— Bertrand Russell

57. “More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.”

— Bertrand Russell

58. “Laughter is the most inexpensive and most effective wonder drug. Laughter is a universal medicine.”

— Bertrand Russell

59. “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

60. “Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence.”

— Bertrand Russell

61. “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.”

— Bertrand Russell

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

— Bertrand Russell

63. “Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation.”

— Bertrand Russell

64. “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

— Bertrand Russell

65. “Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.”

— Bertrand Russell

66. “Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.”

— Bertrand Russell

67. “The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”

— Bertrand Russell

68. “Through the greatness of the universe, which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”

— Bertrand Russell

69. “What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry.”

— Bertrand Russell

70. “Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

71. “The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.”

— Bertrand Russell

72. “What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.”

— Bertrand Russell

73. “The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”

— Bertrand Russell

74. “Love is a little haven of refuge from the world.”

— Bertrand Russell

75. “When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.”

— Bertrand Russell

76. “The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.”

— Bertrand Russell

77. “Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven.”

— Bertrand Russell

78. “I don’t care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people’s thoughts. Power over people’s minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.”

— Bertrand Russell

79. “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.”

— Bertrand Russell

80. “When conscious activity is wholly concentrated on some one definite purpose, the ultimate result, for most people, is lack of balance accompanied by some form of nervous disorder.”

— Bertrand Russell

81. “Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.”

— Bertrand Russell

82. “The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.”

— Bertrand Russell

83. “The free intellect is the chief engine of human progress.”

— Bertrand Russell

84. “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”

— Bertrand Russell

85. “Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”

— Bertrand Russell

86. “The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

— Bertrand Russell

87. “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

88. “Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

— Bertrand Russell

89. “A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.”

— Bertrand Russell

90. “Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved.”

— Bertrand Russell

91. “Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that is happiness.”

— Bertrand Russell

92. “Always remember that true happiness is not in getting what you want, but wanting what you already have. He who dies with the most toys is still dead. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

— Bertrand Russell

93. “The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.”

— Bertrand Russell

94. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

95. “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.”

— Bertrand Russell

96. “Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.”

— Bertrand Russell

97. “Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.”

— Bertrand Russell

98. “The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.”

— Bertrand Russell

99. “Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

— Bertrand Russell

100. “A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.”

— Bertrand Russell