Bertrand Russell Quotes on Time
Russell's philosophy of time develops across The Principles of Mathematics, The Analysis of Matter, and the late Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. Following his Cambridge contemporary McTaggart's analysis of the temporal series, Russell defends a version of the B-theory: time is the order of events as related by earlier-than and later-than, and the apparent flow of time — the McTaggartian A-series of past, present, and future — is a feature of how temporal events appear to a temporally embedded observer rather than a feature of the temporal series itself. The position aligns with the four-dimensional space-time continuum of the special and general theories of relativity that Russell helped popularize philosophically in The ABC of Relativity.
Quotes
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“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. -
“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 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. -
“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. -
“Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child – this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”
Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884–1914) , edited by Nicholas Griffin. It should be noted that in his talk of "the race", he is referring to "the human race". Smith married Russell in December 1894; they divorced in 1921. -
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
Our Knowledge of the External World(1914) | p. 167 -
“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”
1930s | The New York Herald-Tribune Magazine (6 March 1938) -
“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) -
“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”
A Free Man's Worship(1903)