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To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.

Bertrand Russell

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Bertrand Russell
Age: 97 †
Born: 1872
Born: May 18
Died: 1970
Died: February 2
Analytic Philosopher
Autobiographer
Epistemologist
Essayist
Journalist
Logician
Mathematician
Metaphysician
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Tryleg
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Russell
Bertrand Russell
3rd Earl Russell
Bertrand Russell
Earl Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
3rd Earl Russell
World
Primitive
Conception
Friendly
Understood
Friendliness
Either
Conceptions
Experience
Hostility
Everything
Hostile
Mind
Shown

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.
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I went to Salt Lake City and the Mormons tried to convert me, but when I found they forbade tea and tobacco I thought it was no religion for me.
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The time has come, or is about to come, when only large-scale civil disobedience, which should be nonviolent, can save the populations from the universal death which their governments are preparing for them.
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Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.
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To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Bertrand Russell
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To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.
Bertrand Russell
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It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.
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Even if we could be certain that one of the world's religions were perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.
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Ants and savages put strangers to death.
Bertrand Russell
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Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
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To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician.
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If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
Bertrand Russell
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We may often do as we please - but we cannot please as we please.
Bertrand Russell
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Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
Bertrand Russell
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Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Bertrand Russell
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[There has been] every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
Bertrand Russell
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All definite knowledge - so I should contend - belongs to science all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack by both sides this No Man's Land is philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
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Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false therefore it is false.
Bertrand Russell
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Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
Bertrand Russell
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Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.
Bertrand Russell