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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

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
May
Modestly
Come
Aware
Much
Philosophy
Things
Hand
Thinking
Knowledge
Like
Keep
Hands
Seems

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Whatever we know without inference is mental.
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The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.
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The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
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We must be sceptical even of our scepticism.
Bertrand Russell
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I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.
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Choose your parents wisely.
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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
Bertrand Russell
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The evolution of our spirit is blazed on the dark background of eternity by our individual wakes. Every person can, if he/she wishes, leave a more or less brilliant wake behind them.
Bertrand Russell
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Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
Bertrand Russell
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A physicist looks for causes that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes.
Bertrand Russell
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Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.
Bertrand Russell
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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.
Bertrand Russell
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Grasshopper always wrong in argument with chicken.
Bertrand Russell
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A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.
Bertrand Russell
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Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Bertrand Russell
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A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?
Bertrand Russell
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In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.
Bertrand Russell
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There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.
Bertrand Russell