Bertrand Russell

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

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

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.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

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

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

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.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.

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

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.

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.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.