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To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

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
Actual
Beginning
Wisdom
Wish
Understand
World

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
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A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
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The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child's own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.
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In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.
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If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure.
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A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.
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I feel as if one would only discover on one's death bed what one ought to have lived for
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To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilisation.
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You must believe that you can help bring about a better world.
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What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?
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It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.
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We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
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If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.
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Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents
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The teacher, like the artist, the philosopher, and the man of letters, can only perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
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The key to happiness is accepting one unpleasant reality every day.
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Bad philosophers may have a certain influence good philosophers, never.
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All's well that ends well which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.
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It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.
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Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.
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