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.