Bertrand Russell Quotes

The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you.

Schultz: You must speak.
Jewish barber: I can't.
Schultz: It's our only hope.

A tool is not necessarily better because it is bigger. A tool is best if it does the job required with a minimum of effort, with a minimum of complexity, and with a minimum of power.

Let us suppose that a man believes in eternal life on Christ's word. In that case he believes without any fuss about being profound and searching and philosophical and racking his brains.

But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.

I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.

We have to care about our bodies and what we put in them. Women have to take the time to focus on our mental health—take time for self, for the spiritual, without feeling guilty or selfish. The world will see you the way you see you, and treat you the way you treat yourself.

And you stood there in front of me just
Close enough to touch,
Close enough to hope you couldn't see
What I was thinking of.Drop everything now,
Meet me in the pouring rain.
Kiss me on the sidewalk,
Take away the pain.
'Cause I see sparks fly whenever you smile.

Su Tungp'o said: "Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace." I should be ungrateful to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record.

The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

I can dispel the clouds, drain the sea, or cure someone hopelessly ill. But to change the mind of a fool is beyond me.

I feel I am privileged to express a hope. The hope is this: that we shall have peace throughout the world: that we shall abolish wars, and settle all international differences at the conference table: that we shall abolish all atom and hydrogen bombs, before they abolish us first.

Don't disparage the day that still has an hour of light in its hand.

Fewer people are bent from hard work than are crooked from avoiding it.

From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.

I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer. These poems overwhelm without competing with his prose, and I am grateful to have this collection.