Bertrand Russell

1872–1970 · British philosopher and logician

Topics: learning, mathematics, creativity, life

• Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

  — Bertrand Russell

• The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

  — Bertrand Russell

• All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

  — Bertrand Russell

• 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. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

  — Bertrand Russell

• The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next...

  — Bertrand Russell

• Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

  — Bertrand Russell

• The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know

  — Bertrand Russell

• A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

  — Bertrand Russell

• It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.

  — Bertrand Russell

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

  — Bertrand Russell

• I may as well say at once that I do not distinguish between inference and deduction. What is called induction appears to me to be either disguised deduction or a mere method of making plausible guesses.

  — Bertrand Russell

• The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

  — Bertrand Russell

• The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.

  — Bertrand Russell

• One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

  — Bertrand Russell

• Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

  — Bertrand Russell

• Modern physics... reduces matter to a set of events which proceed outward from a centre. If there is something further in the centre itself, we cannot know about it, and it is irrelevant to physics.

  — Bertrand Russell

• The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

  — Bertrand Russell

• Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

  — Bertrand Russell

• Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

  — Bertrand Russell

• Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

  — Bertrand Russell