Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.
We must be sceptical even of our scepticism.
The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left.
It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
All religions are both harmful and untrue.
A European who goes to New York and Chicago sees the future... when he goes to Asia he sees the past.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
The road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.
What else is there to make life tolerable? We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness. Sometimes a voice of one drowning, and in a moment the silence returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful, the unhappiness of many people is very great, and I often wonder how they all endure it. It is usually the central thing around which their lives are built, and I suppose if they did not live most of their lives in the things of the moment, they would not be able to go on.
What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer
A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.
We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.
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.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.
There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.
The man who only loves beautiful things is dreaming, whereas the man who knows absolute beauty is wide awake.
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.
Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.
People will tell us that without the consolations of religion they would be intolerably unhappy. So far as this is true, it is a coward's argument. Nobody but a coward would consciously choose to live in a fool's paradise. When a man suspects his wife of infidelity, he is not thought the better of for shutting his eyes to the evidence. And I cannot see why ignoring evidence should be contemptible in one case and admirable in the other.
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