Bertrand Russell

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

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.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a severe perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

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.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

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

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

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

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

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

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.

The only way to be sure of having a friend is to be one.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

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

I am a mathematician and a logician. I am not a mystic. I am not a prophet. I am not a guru. I am a rationalist.