Bertrand Russell Quotes on Love
Russell's Marriage and Morals (1929) and the more popular The Conquest of Happiness (1930) developed a frankly post-Christian philosophy of love, marriage, and sexual ethics that combined his liberal political principles with the post-Victorian sexual liberalism of his Bloomsbury and Cambridge milieu. The argument is that traditional sexual morality treats jealous possessiveness, doctrinal dogma, and the fear of sex as principles of moral order rather than as obstacles to the actual goods that intimate human relationships can supply. The book is a period piece in many of its specific recommendations, but its central claim — that an ethics of love must be built on knowledge of human nature and of the social conditions of human happiness rather than on inherited theological authority — remains influential.
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 -
“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”
Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her. -
“I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza 's God, it won't love us in return.”
1910s | Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912, as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318