Bertrand Russell Quotes

A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about.

The more I see, the less I know.

To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.

I think, therefore I am confused.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

I know that I don’t know.

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, then you haven't really understood it

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

It made perfect sense, and at the same time nothing seemed to.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

The more I know, the less I understand

There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.

I think of how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

Some things were beyond understanding.

Every path to a new understanding begins in confusion.

I think this is one of those issues where the deeper you dig, the murkier it gets - and everyone who has spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.