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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.
Bertrand Russell
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If you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted life in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a "new boy" in another.
Bertrand Russell
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The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.
Bertrand Russell
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In the ordinary business of life punctuality is... necessary.
Bertrand Russell
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In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.
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Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable.
Bertrand Russell
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Into every tidy scheme for arranging the pattern of human life, it is necessary to inject a certain dose of anarchism.
Bertrand Russell
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Philosophy arises from an unusually obstinate attempt to arrive at real knowledge. What passes for knowledge in ordinary life suffers from three defects: it is cocksure, vague and self-contradictory. The first step towards philosophy consists in becoming aware of these defects, not in order to rest content with a lazy scepticism, but in order to substitute an amended kind of knowledge which shall be tentative, precise and self-consistent.
Bertrand Russell
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The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form — in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality — has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life.
Bertrand Russell
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The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others.
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Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head.
Bertrand Russell
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The history of science abundantly proves that a body of abstract propositions - even if, as in the case of conic sections, it remains two thousand years without effect upon daily life - may yet, at any moment, be used to cause a revolution in the habitual thoughts and occupations of every citizen.
Bertrand Russell
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The scientific philosophy, therefore, which aims only at understanding the world and not directly at any other improvement of human life, cannot take account of ethical notions without being turned aside from that submission to fact which is the essence of the scientific temper.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.
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A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.
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The practice of inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to civilized life, makes mistakes easier, by preventing experience of the actions to which a desire would otherwise lead, and by often causing the inhibited impulses themselves to be unnoticed or quickly forgotten.
Bertrand Russell
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Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill.
Bertrand Russell
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It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs.
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Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
Bertrand Russell
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Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.
Bertrand Russell
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In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.
Bertrand Russell
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It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women....It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.
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Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of though and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave.
Bertrand Russell
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Why the dinosaurs died out is not known, but it is supposed to be because they had minute brains and devoted themselves to the gorwth of weapons of offense in the shape of numerous horns. However that may be, it was not through their line that life developed.
Bertrand Russell
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Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Bertrand Russell
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Born:
May 18, 1872
Died:
February 2, 1970
(aged 97)
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