Bertrand Russell - A History of Western Philosophy (1940)

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To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

Bertrand Russell
All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

Bertrand Russell
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

Bertrand Russell
Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of great importance.

Bertrand Russell
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand.

Bertrand Russell
In 1744 he [David Hume] made an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a professorship at Edinburgh; having failed in this, he became first tutor to a lunatic and then secretary to a general. Fortified by these credentials he ventured again into philosophy.

Bertrand Russell
In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.

Bertrand Russell
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'.

Bertrand Russell
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

Bertrand Russell
To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view.

Bertrand Russell
The atomists, unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.

Bertrand Russell