Bertrand Russell Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. The Conquest of Happiness

2. 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.

3. It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

4. Love is wise,Hatred is foolish

5. Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

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

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

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

9. The world is full of injustice, and those who profit by injustice are in a position to administer rewards and punishments. The rewards go to those who invent ingenious justifications for inequality, the punishments to those who try to remedy it. Sceptical Essays

10. There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

11. Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

12. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

13. To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

14. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it. A History of Western Philosophy

15. What does emerge is the importance of a right theory as to what constitutes happiness. In such important acts as choosing a career, a man is greatly influenced by theory. If a wrong theory prevails, successful men will be unhappy, but will not know why.This fills them with rage, which leads them to desire the slaughter of younger men, whom they envy unconsciously. Most modern politics, while nominally based on economics, is really due to rage caused by lack of instinctive satisfaction; and this lack, in turn, is largely due to false popular psychology. Sceptical Essays

16. Yo no nací dichoso. De niño, mi himno favorito era: «Cansado del mundo y con el peso de mis pecados». A los cinco años yo pensaba que si había de vivir setenta no había pasado aún más que la catorceava parte de mi vida vital, y me parecía casi insoportable la enorme cantidad de aburrimiento que me aguardaba. En la adolescencia la vida me era odiosa, y estaba continuamente al borde del suicidio, del cual me libré gracias al deseo de saber más matemáticas. Hoy, por el contrario, gusto de la vida, y casi estoy por decir que cada año que pasa la encuentro más gustosa. Esto es debido, en parte, a haber descubierto cuáles eran las cosas que deseaba más y haber adquirido gradualmente muchas de ellas. En parte es debido también a haberme desprendido, felizmente, de ciertos deseos (la adquisición del conocimiento indudable acerca de algo) como esencialmente inasequibles. Pero en la mayor parte se debe a la preocupación, cada día menor, de mí mismo. The Conquest of Happiness

17. القوة الجديدة التي يخلقها "العلم" تكون خيّرة بقدر الحكمة التي يتميز بها الإنسان ، وتكون شريرة بقدر ما في الإنسان من حمق !لذلك فإن أُريدَ للحضارة العلمية أن تكون حضارة خيرة ، فقد وجب أن تقترن بزيادة المعرفة زيادة في الحكمة ، وأعني بالحكمة الإدراك السليم لغايات الحياة . وهذا في ذاته أمر لا يقدمه العلم . فزيادة العلم لا تكفي لتحقيق رقي صادق ، وإن قدمت واحداً من مقومات الرقي .

18. ...although our age far surpasses all previous ages in knowledge, there has been no correlative increase in wisdom.

19. ...the Churches, everywhere, opposed as long as they could practically every innovation that made for an increase of happiness or knowledge here on Earth History of Western Philosophy

20. Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices A History of Western Philosophy

21. Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

22. Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths. The Impact of Science on Society

23. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

24. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own. What I Believe

25. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

26. How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

27. I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into a duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. A History of Western Philosophy

28. If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons.

29. Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? The Problems of Philosophy

30. It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.