Thought-full Physics

              A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 49.

            The great artists, the great thinkers, and the great religious teachers of the world have had quite other standards. They have valued the individual; they have praised spontaneous impulse; they have conceived the good life as one lived from within, not forced into conformity to an external mechanism. They have not sought to make men convenient material for the manipulations of rulers, but to make them spiritually free to pursue what they believed to be good, regardless of law and public opinion. This was the teaching of Christ, of Buddha, of Lao-tsze; in another form, the same emphasis on the individual is to be found in Shakespere, and in Galileo’s resistance to the Inquisition.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 68.

            Patriotism and the class war are the two great dangers to the world in the present age. Material progress has increased men’s power of injuring one another, and there has been no correlative moral progress. Until men realize that warfare, which was once a pleasant pastime, has now become race suicide, until they realize that the indulgence of hatred makes social life impossible with modern powers of destruction, there can be no hope for the world. It is moral progress that is needed; men must learn toleration and the avoidance of violence, or civilization must perish in universal degradation and misery.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 75

            I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations, and other things similar to sensations as regards extent and duration. As against the view that introspection reveals a mental world radically different from sensations, I propose to argue that thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains, and emotions are all built up out of sensations and images alone, and that there is reason to think that images do not differ from sensations in their intrinsic character. We thus effect a mutual rapprochement of mind and matter, and reduce the ultimate data of introspection (in our second sense) to images alone.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 99.

            Physics and psychology are not distinguished by their material. Mind and matter alike are logical constructions; the particulars out of which they are constructed, or from which they are inferred, have various relations, some of which are studied by physics, others by psychology. Broadly speaking, physics group particulars by their active places, psychology by their passive places.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 99.

            Pure science—the understanding of natural processes, and the discovery of how the universe is constructed—seems to me the most godlike thing that men can do. When I am tempted (as I often am) to wish the human race wiped out by some passing comet, I think of scientific knowledge and of art; these two things seem to make our existence not wholly futile. But the uses of science, even at the best, are on a lower plane. A philosophy which values them more than science itself is gross and cannot in the long run be otherwise than destructive of science.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 113.

            Physical is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 113.

            As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like every one else. There is of course no point in deliberately flouting public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a strength and a source of happiness.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 120.

Spirit of the Matter

             These four passions—acquisitiveness, vanity, rivalry, and love of power—are, after the basic instincts, the prime movers of almost all the happiness in politics. Their operation is intensified and regulated by the herd instinct. . . . Among men, as among other gregarious animals, the united action, in any given circumstances, is determined partly by the common passions of the herd, partly by imitation of leaders. The art of politics consists in causing the latter to prevail over the former. . . . Of the four passions we have enumerated, only one, namely acquisitiveness, is concerned at all directly with men’s relations to their material conditions. The other three—vanity, rivalry, and love of power—are concerned with social relations. I think this is the source of what is erroneous in the Marxian interpretation of history, which tacitly assumes that acquisitiveness is the source of all political actions.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 22.

            The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than to let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 26.

            In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we are alive, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 43.    

            A life lived in this spirit—the spirit that aims at creating rather than possessing—has a certain fundamental happiness, of which it cannot be wholly robbed by adverse circumstances. This is the way of life recommended in the Gospels, and by all the great teachers of the world. Those who have found it are freed from the tyranny of fear, since what they value most in their lives is not at the mercy of outside power.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 45.

            Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 47.

            If, on the other hand, you have as part of the habitual furniture of your mind the past ages of man, his slow and partial emergence out of barbarism, and the brevity of his total existence in comparison with astronomical epochs—if, I say, such thoughts have molded your habitual feelings, you will realize that the momentary battle upon which you are engaged cannot be of such importance as to risk a backward step towards the darkness out of which we have been slowly emerging. . . . If you have attained to this outlook, a certain deep happiness will never leave you, whatever your personal fate may be. Life will become a communion with the great of all ages, and personal death no more than a negligible incident.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 48.