Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
BERTRAND RUSSELLYour writing is never as good as you hoped, but never as bad as you feared.
More Bertrand Russell Quotes
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Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.
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Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.
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Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
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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.
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Love is wise, hatred is foolish.
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Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.
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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.
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I consider the official Catholic attitude on divorce, birth control, and censorship exceedingly dangerous to mankind.
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Is there any knowledge in the world that is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?
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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.
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
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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.
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The secret of happiness is very simple: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
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Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.
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Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
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I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
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The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
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To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
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I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.
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The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
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One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
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Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
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No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
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We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.
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Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
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To write a tragedy, a man must feel the tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.
BERTRAND RUSSELL