Bertrand Russell Quotes on Life (25 Quotes)

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war, and love all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

By religion I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

The doctrine, as I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no need of technical terms or of changes in the significance of common terms. I find myself totally unable to accept this view. I object to it 1. Because it is insincere 2. Because it is capable of excusing ignorance of mathematics, physics and neurology in those who have had only a classical education 3. Because it is advanced by some in a tone of unctuous rectitude, as if opposition to it were a sin against democracy 4. Because it makes philosophy trivial 5. Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.

We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.

Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor

The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenomenon in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one would make a fuss about if one were not personally concerned

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.

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.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.