Quotes by Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is very important.

What men want is not knowledge but certainty.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

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

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

One must care about a world one will not see.

The habit of looking into the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.

All movements go too far.

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness it is a sign of emotional failure.

Simpson succeeded in proving that there was no harm in giving anaesthetics to men because God put Adam into a deep sleep when He extracted his rib. But male ecclesiastics remained unconvinced as regards the sufferings of women at any rate in childbirth.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

Work is of two kinds: first altering a position of matter at or near the earths surface relatively to other such matter second telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid the second is pleasant and highly paid.

A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.

The accusation of metaphysics has become in philosophy something like the accusation of being a security risk in the public service. I do not for my part know what is meant by the word metaphysics. The only definition I have found that fits all cases is: a philosophical opinion not held by the present author.

One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists in either England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it, a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to man’s constructive impulses without entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.