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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.

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
Children
Seeking
Wholly
Really
Relation
Dry
Information
Spontaneous
Education
Follows
Child
Desires
Knowledge
Useful
Supplying
Interest
Interests
Detailed
Desire
Direction
Instinctive

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

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Intelligence, it might be said, has caused our troubles but it is not unintelligence that will cure them. Only more and wiser intelligence can make a happier world
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Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale
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One who believes, as I do, that the free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.
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We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think in fact they do so.
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The whiter my hair becomes, the more ready people are to believe what I say.
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We love our habits more than our income, often more than our life.
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It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
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Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery, and in such a world hopes could only be irrational.
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It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion.
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Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
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The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
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The difficulty is old, but none the less real. An omnipotent being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.
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One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
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Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.
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Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.
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Protagoras did not know if the gods exist, but he held in any case they ought to be worshiped. Philosophy, according to him, had nothing edifying to teach, and for the survival of morals we must rely upon the thoughtlessness of the majority and their willingness to believe what they had been taught.
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My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.
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Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of the world.
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Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are concerned.
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But I simply can't stand a view limited to this earth, I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds...I like mathematics largely because it is not human.
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