Bertrand Russell

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

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

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.