Bertrand Russell Quotes

Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as a sensible intelligible world.

Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.

Metaphysics is a science.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

I want to study philosophy. That fascinates me.

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

The science of mathematics performs more than it promises, but the science of metaphysics promises more than it performs.

The science [geometry] is pursued for the sake of the knowledge of what eternally exists, and not of what comes for a moment into existence, and then perishes.

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.

Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.

To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world , and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason , this and nothing else is philosophy.

I acknowledge that four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

There are beds and tables in the world - plenty of them, are there not? But there are only two ideas or forms of them - one the idea of a bed, the other of a table.

One may say that mathematics talks about the things which are of no concern to men. Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight - brilliant, sharp but cold ... thus we are clearest where knowledge matters least: in mathematics, especially number theory.

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

The world must be romanticized. In this way the originary meaning may be found again.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them