Bertrand Russell Quotes

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

I am fascinated by that notion of people are never as they seem. And that doesn't make them good or bad. It's just we don't ever really show ourselves if we don't have to.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

I know a lot of people think, 'She's so glamorous.' But that's really not me at all.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

The way people see you is the way you really are.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

The average person's ear weighs what you are, not what you were.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

My public persona is badly warped and bears little resemblance to the person those closest to me know.

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

I look at myself objectively and in a way I see myself as a commodity. Your name becomes somehow outside yourself. Now, when I'm at home being Mrs. Scarfe, that's when I'm most myself.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

The frame of the cave leads to the frame of man.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

People see us as no better than we are.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

I've always been a big fan of Philip K. Dick; I love his work. There's a returning theme of identity and the fragility of our identity. Even when we are looking at what we think is a stark reality, it might actually be something completely different.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'