Bertrand Russell Quotes

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

You have no beginning of time. It's always been there.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

I confess, I do not believe in time.

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Asking what was before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole. It is not a defined question and has no meaning.

I would like to live forever if it was possible.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaître first proposed this [Big Bang] theory. ... There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. .... It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed for all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it.

When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Many men ridicule the idea that it can be scientifically handled. They tell us the unemployed have always been with us, and always must be. It is the oldest reason in the world for tolerating injustice and misery.

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.

Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.

For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you "today" never comes to an end: and yet our "today" does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply "today."

We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.

The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

I just don't understand why the idea of the universe creating itself is a rational one

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas.