Bertrand Russell Quotes

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

The Greeks are wrong to recognize coming into being and perishing; for nothing comes into being nor perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being composition and perishing dissolution.

Through Plato, Aristotle came to believe in God; but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him; but Aristotle thought God through logically, and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in 'Timaeus' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teachings.'

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment.

Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?

What's a philosopher?' said Brutha. Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.

The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .

It was Heraclitus' ideas that seized Nietzsche so totally that he became completely mad.

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.

Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.