Bertrand Russell

Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true.

It is in the belief that many people who are unhappy could become happy by well-directed effort that I have written this book.

But the greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism: the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.

Few things are more firmly established in popular philosophy than the distinction between mind and matter.

The Russian Revolution is one of the great heroic events of the world’s history.

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy.

In dark days, men need a clear faith and a well-grounded hope; and as the outcome of these, the calm courage which takes no account of hardships by the way.

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.

The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems.

Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun.

Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored.

Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures.

Icarus, having been taught to fly by his father Daedalus, was destroyed by his rashness.

To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike.

It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy.

The hen with a brood of ducklings no doubt has intuition which seems to place her inside them, and not merely to know them analytically; but when the ducklings take to the water, the whole apparent intuition is seen to be illusory, and the hen is left helpless on the shore.

Behaviourism has not, however, sprung from observing the folly of men. It is the wisdom of animals that has suggested the view.