Bertrand Russell

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

“I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.”

“If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.”

“Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.”

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

“Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.”

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”

“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”

“In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.”

“Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.”

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

“Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.”

“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”

“The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.”

“Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.”

“The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.”

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”

“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.”