Bertrand Russell

"Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."

"Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it."

"Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture."

"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 most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."

"Those who fear life are already three parts dead."

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

"The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty."

"The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved."

"Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible."

"The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite."

"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own."

"From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution... It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'. While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation."

"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."

"Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform."

"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics."

"A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal..."

"And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence"

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

"Advocates of capitalism like to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."