Bertrand Russell Quotes

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

The most valuable asset we have, actually, is our ability to understand, to do the right thing, to be kind, to be decent.

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

If a man has no humaneness what can his propriety be like? If a man has no humaneness what can his happiness be like?

There is no real excellence in all of this world which can be separated from right living.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

It is by doing good that we become good.

A superior man thinks of what is right. A small man thinks of profit.

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.

Civilization depends on morality.

Being a 'good man' is something you do, not something you are.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

I'm a good person. I've led a good life.

Virtue is the first title of nobility.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

I believe that rules do not make us moral; loving each other makes us moral.

There is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue.

All the devils respect virtue.

Without Virtue there can be no liberty

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

Prudence is a quality incompatible with vice, and can never be effectively enlisted in its cause.