Bertrand Russell Quotes on World (31 Quotes)


    I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

    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.

    The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

    Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world

    The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.



    Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

    Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum one man will think that he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God.

    The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress.

    Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.

    It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it, they remain barren

    The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

    A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

    What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer.

    5. a priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.

    Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, the chief glory of man.

    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.

    The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

    To save the world requires faith and courage faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true

    Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, A larger portion of fear than they should.

    The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

    The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

    We are all prone to the malady of the introvert who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.

    Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.

    If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

    Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

    The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

    We must care about the world of our children and grandchildren, a world we may never see.

    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.

    A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

    The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.


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