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The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

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
Deepest
Leading
Search
Permanent
Instinct
Philosophy
Something
Men
Instincts

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
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I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
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It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone's malignity.
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A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us
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The first essential character [of civilization], I should say, is forethought. This, indeed, is what mainly distinguishes men from brutes and adults from children.
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To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
Bertrand Russell
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It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.
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It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.
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Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens.
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The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
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The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.
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Drunkenness is temporary suicide.
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The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
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The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.
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To fear love is to fear life.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
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One must care about a world one will not see.
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I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of that joy. ... I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
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In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
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Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell