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The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

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
Part
Best
Play
Possessive
Life
Impulses
Largest
Smallest
Impulse
Creative

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Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
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The Axiom of Choice is necessary to select a set from an infinite number of socks, but not an infinite number of shoes.
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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.
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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 drop of water is not immortal it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal.
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At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
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There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere only triviality for a moment and then nothing.
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All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive.
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That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
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Always remember that true happiness is not in getting what you want, but wanting what you already have. He who dies with the most toys is still dead. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
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Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events.
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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 secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.
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The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.
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One of the most painful circumstances of recent advances in science is that each one makes us know less than we thought we did
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The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
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Without civic morality communities perish without personal morality their survival has no value.
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Collective wisdom, alas, is no adequate substitute for the intelligence of individuals. Individuals who opposed received opinions have been the source of all progress, both moral and intellectual. They have been unpopular, as was natural.
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Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
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Cruelty is, in theory, a perfectly adequate ground for divorce, but it may be interpreted so as to become absurd.
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