A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
Author
Bertrand Russell
121 quotations
About Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was an English philosopher, logician, and social reformer. Regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century and a founder of analytic philosophy, Russell wrote over 70 books and thousands of other articles, essays, lectures, and letters. His writings concerned mathematical, logical, philosophical, epistemological, political, and moral topics.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Bertrand RussellOne of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter second, telling other people to do so.
Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.
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.
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
Advertisement
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
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.
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.
A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of …
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.
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 doc…
I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.