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The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959 QUOTES

The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959 QUOTES

1 " The whole conception of 'sin' is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

2 " I will say a few words about the connection of love and intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a sentamentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual, and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

3 " To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

4 " When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

5 " Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

6 " In spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in determining politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of error which may be fatal in practice. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

7 " The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

8 " All medical men who have studied the matter know that punishment only aggravates the trouble. Sometimes the cause is physical, but usually it is psychological, and only curable by removing some deepseated and probably unconscious grievance. But most people enjoy punishing anyone who irritates them, and so the medical view is rejected as fancy nonsense. The "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

9 " The best we can do, according to Bradley, is to say things that are ‘not intellectually corrigible’—further progress is only possible through a synthesis of thought and feeling, which, when achieved, will lead to our saying nothing. Ideas have degrees of truth, greater or less according to the stage at which they come in the dialectic. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

10 " Ridicule, nominally amusing but really an expression of hostility, was the favourite weapon—the worst possible, short of actual cruelty, in dealing with young people. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

11 " But in the ’nineties young men desired something more sweeping and passionate, more bold and less bland. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

12 " Ibsen, Strindberg, and Nietzsche were angry men—not primarily angry about this or that, but just angry. And so they each found an outlook on life that justified anger. The young admired their passion, and found in it an outlet for their own feelings of revolt against parental authority. The assertion of freedom seemed sufficiently noble to justify violence; the violence duly ensued, but freedom was lost in the process. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

13 " If it is the devil that tempts the young to enjoy themselves, is it not the same personage that persuades the old to condemn their enjoyment? And is not condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to old age? "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

14 " Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

15 " I was encouraged in my transition to philosophy by a certain disgust with mathematics, resulting from too much concentration and too much absorption in the sort of skill that is needed in examinations. The attempt to acquire examination technique had led me to think of mathematics as consisting of artful dodges and ingenious devices and as altogether too much like a cross-word puzzle. When, at the end of my first three years at Cambridge, I emerged from my last mathematical examination I swore that I would never look at mathematics again and sold all my mathematical books. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959

16 " Hegel thought of the universe as a closely knit unity. His universe was like a jelly in the fact that, if you touched any one part of it, the whole quivered; but it was unlike a jelly in the fact that it could not really be cut up into parts. The appearance of consisting of parts, according to him, was a delusion. "

― Bertrand Russell , The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959