Bertrand Russell Quotes

What are we after all our dreams, after all our memories?

I just think it’s amazing that a person could lose everything, chasing nothing.

How strange it is that life must be nearly over, before one fully learns to live!

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.

I am waiting for a sign that will indicate to me what meaning I must give to my life, but right now my existence is satisfactory.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won't be me.

I do think that people have moments of realisation in real life - even if it's on their death beds - when they suddenly think, 'Jesus - what did I do?'

I am indeed a fortunate man and today's hours are but a bonus, undeserved. Why have I been allowed to live this extra day when others, far better than I, have departed? Is it that they have accomplished their purpose while mine is yet to be achieved? Is this another opportunity for me to become the man I know I can be?

We never think of the main business of life till a vain repentance minds us of it at the wrong end.

Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.

I can't imagine pain greater than stepping across the veil and realizing I had not done what I came here to do - or realizing that I had given up my life to little or nothing, only then to find that it was gone. p 3

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

It is better to lose your life than to waste it.

If one has a purpose, life is bearable enough, do you not think so?

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

I love my life, because I’ve seen my purpose.

The real joy in life comes from finding your true purpose and aligning it with what you do every single day.