Bertrand Russell

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

[ Of Aldous Huxley :] You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he’d been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes, and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath.

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with a serious affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

We are thus led to a somewhat vague distinction between what we may call “hard” data and “soft” data. . . . I mean by “hard” data those which resist the solvent influence of critical reflection, and by “soft” data those which, under the operation of this process, become to our minds more or less doubtful.

The first step in wisdom, as well as in morality, is to open the windows of the ego as wide as possible.

People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war and that there is not too much interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people that wars are righteous.

We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.

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 flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

Whether science—and indeed civilization in general—can long survive depends upon psychology, that is to say, it depends upon what human beings desire.

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.

The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

We believe, first and foremost, what makes us feel that we are fine fellows.

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.

Science, by itself, cannot supply us with an ethic. It can show us how to achieve a given end, and it may show us that some ends cannot be achieved.

In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.

Religions which have any very strong hold over men’s actions have generally some instinctive basis.

Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces ot unreason destroy one another in futile strife.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

Ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions.

I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.

For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.

Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.

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 that there is anything grand about the introvert’s unhappiness.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.