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All human activity is prompted by desire.

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
Activity
Desire
Human
Humans
Prompted

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Only in thought is man a God in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.
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If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
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It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life , and that unless contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs.
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If a law were passed giving six months to every writer of a first book, only the good ones would do it.
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Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
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When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection.
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All movements go too far.
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Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort that would look exciting to the outward eye.
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Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
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Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent
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[Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.
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William James used to preach the will-to-believe. For my part, I should wish to preach the will-to-doubt. None of our beliefs are quite true all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
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Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.
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All religions are both harmful and untrue.
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I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.
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The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
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The luxury to disparage freedom is the privilege of those who already possess it.
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On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge
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Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
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Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence, no matter what orthodoxy it may be.
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