Bertrand Russell Quotes on Life
Russell's popular philosophical writing on the conduct of life — The Conquest of Happiness (1930), In Praise of Idleness (1935), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927) — set out a frankly post-Christian secular humanism designed to supply the practical philosophical guidance that Christian theology had supplied for previous generations. The principal claims are that happiness is for the most part a product of the disinterested intellectual and affective interests through which a person engages with the world beyond the self; that the modern cultivation of personal anxiety, status competition, and pseudo-religious nationalist enthusiasm is the principal obstacle to such engagement; and that a humane civilization requires the institutional conditions under which ordinary people can develop the breadth of interest the framework recommends.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bertrand Russell:
“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 good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
What I Believe, 1925 -
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”
Marriage and Morals, 1929 -
“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”
Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking. -
“I should like to believe my people's religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson's comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”
Greek Exercises (1888), written two days after his sixteenth birthday. -
“It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.”
Sceptical Essays(1928) | Ch. 12: Free Thought and Official Propaganda -
“Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage... It is only intellect that keeps me sane; perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect against feeling.”
1910s | Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174 -
“A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.”
Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays(1918) | Ch. 2: The Place of Science in a Liberal Education -
“The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.”
New Hopes for a Changing World(1951) | Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, p. 10 -
“All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.”
1900s | Letter to Lucy Donnely, April 22, 1906 -
“Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.”
A Free Man's Worship(1903)