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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
Life
Impulses
Largest
Smallest
Impulse
Creative
Part
Best
Play
Possessive

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.
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Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.
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One must care about a world one will not see.
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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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As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our trouble. . . . No Catholic, for instance, takes seriously the text which says that a Bishop should be the husband of one wife.
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I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.
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When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.
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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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Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.
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Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.
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A hallucination is a fact, not an error what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
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It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.
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I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.
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The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.
Bertrand Russell
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Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
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If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
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The whole of theology, in regard to hell no less than to heaven, takes it for granted that Man is what is of most importance in the Universe of created beings. Since all theologians are men, this postulate has met with little opposition.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
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Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.
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It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know-or care-about circumstances in the colonies.
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