Bertrand Russell Quotes | GloryQuotes

Bertrand Russell Quotes About Happiness

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

Bertrand Russell

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

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

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Bertrand Russell

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

Bertrand Russell

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Bertrand Russell

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell Quotes About Love

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Bertrand Russell

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.

Bertrand Russell

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

Bertrand Russell

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

Bertrand Russell

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

Bertrand Russell

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

Bertrand Russell

More Quotes by Bertrand Russell

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Bertrand Russell

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

Bertrand Russell

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Bertrand Russell

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Bertrand Russell

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Bertrand Russell

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

Bertrand Russell

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Bertrand Russell

Democracy is the process by which people choose the man who'll get the blame.

Bertrand Russell

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Bertrand Russell

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Bertrand Russell

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

Bertrand Russell

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Bertrand Russell

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

Bertrand Russell

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

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

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

Bertrand Russell

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Bertrand Russell

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Bertrand Russell

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Bertrand Russell

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Bertrand Russell

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Bertrand Russell

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.

Bertrand Russell

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like.

Bertrand Russell

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

Bertrand Russell

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Bertrand Russell

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

Bertrand Russell

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Bertrand Russell

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Bertrand Russell

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.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Bertrand Russell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

Bertrand Russell

Browse 130 quotes attributed to Bertrand Russell, listed in the source data as a British Philosopher, organized around themes such as Happiness, Love, Life. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.