WednesdayApr 15, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.
Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself ... When we compare the (present) human population of the globe with ... that of former times, we see that 'chemical imperialism' has been ... the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted.
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
The most savage controversies are about those matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.
If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
What is wanted is not the will to believe but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.
War does not determine who is right only who is left.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
I am delighted to know that Principia Mathematica can now be done by machinery... I am quite willing to believe that anything in deductive logic can be done by machinery.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
The doctrine, as I understand it, consists in maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy, which has no need of technical terms or of changes in the significance of common terms. I find myself totally unable to accept this view. I object to it: 1.Because it is insincere; 2.Because it is capable of excusing ignorance of mathematics, physics and neurology in those who have had only a classical education; 3.Because it is advanced by some in a tone of unctuous rectitude, as if opposition to it were a sin against democracy; 4.Because it makes philosophy trivial; 5.Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.
In a society safe and worthy to be free, teaching which produces a willingness to lead, as well as a willingness to follow, must be given to all.
To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway about the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'.
The secret of happiness is this let your interests be wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you dont know.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. Certain characteristics of the subject are clear. To begin with, we do not, in this subject, deal with particular things or particular properties: we deal formally with what can be said about 'any' thing or 'any' property. We are prepared to say that one and one are two, but not that Socrates and Plato are two, because, in our capacity of logicians or pure mathematicians, we have never heard of Socrates or Plato. A world in which there were no such individuals would still be a world in which one and one are two. It is not open to us, as pure mathematicians or logicians, to mention anything at all, because, if we do so we introduce something irrelevant and not formal.
A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more that anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
If you call your opponent a politician, its grounds for libel.
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
In the first place a philosophical proposition must be general. It must not deal specially with things on the surface of the earth, or within the solar system, or with any other portion of space and time.... This brings us to a second characteristic of philosophical propositions, namely that they must be a priori. A philosophical proposition must be such as can neither be proved nor disproved by empirical evidence.... Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes indistinguishable from logic as that word has now come to be used.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Indemnity for the past and security for the future.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.
There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.
The study of logic becomes the central study in philosophy: it gives the method of research in philosophy, just as mathematics gives the method in physics.... All this supposed knowledge in the traditional systems must be swept away, and a new beginning m
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
It seems clear that there must be some way of defining logic otherwise than in relation to a particular logical language. The fundamental characteristic of logic, obviously, is that which is indicated when we say that logical propositions are true in virt
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.
Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what one is talking about nor whether what is said is true.
At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.
At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
It can be shown that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any universe containing several objects. The fact that our universe lends itself to mathematical treatment is not a fact of any great philosophical significance.
'But,' you might say, 'none of this shakes my belief that 2 and 2 are 4.' You are quite right, except in marginal cases and it is only in marginal cases that you are doubtful whether a certain animal is a dog or a certain length is less than a meter. Tw
I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers expected me to accept,
I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, 'Good God, what have I said?' and then I knew it was true.
Its not what you have lost, but what you have left that counts.
How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?
What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.
The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.
To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.
I found, one day in school, a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
If I had the power to organize higher education as I should wish it to be, I should seek to substitute for the old orthodox religions which appeal to few among the young, and those as a rule the least intelligent and the most obscurantist something wh
Christ believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.
A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him. The
A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it almost seem like a live teacher.
Upon hearing via Littlewood an exposition on the theory of relativity: To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.
A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts the less you know, the hotter you get.
Never let yourself be diverted either by what you would wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. Look only at ... the facts.
We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress.
Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.
5. a priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.
4. Form The 'form' of a proposition is that, in it, which remains unchanged when every constituent of the proposition is replaced by another.
3. Formality Thus the absence of all mention of particular things or properties in logic or pure mathematics is a necessary result of the fact that this study is, as we say, 'purely formal'.
2. Analytic It is clear that the definition of 'logic' or 'mathematics' must be sought by trying to give a new definition of the old notion of 'analytic' propositions.
1. Generality Certain characteristics of the subject are clear. To begin with, we do not in this subject deal with particular things or particular properties: we deal formally with what can be said about any thing or any property. We are prepared to say that one and one are two, but not that Socrates and Plato are two....
We know too much and feel too little. At least we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life spring.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Change is one thing, progress is another. 'Change' is scientific, 'progress' is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
Calculus required continuity, and continuity was supposed to require the infinitely little; but nobody could discover what the infinitely little might be.
Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
Drunkeness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.
All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.
Our instinctive emotions are those that we have inherited from a much more dangerous world, and contain, therefore, A larger portion of fear than they should.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
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