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.
Philosophers
Bertrand Russell
Born in Britain in 1872 into the aristocratic Russell family, Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, logician, and mathematician. In the monumental Principia Mathematica, co-authored with Whitehead, he attempted to ground all of mathematics in logic and became one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Russell's Paradox revolutionized set theory; he advanced logical atomism as a philosophical method. He was also a committed anti-war and nuclear-disarmament activist. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 and sustained his intellectual combat until his death at 97.
View this figure's profile
Bertrand Russell's Other Quotes
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Related Quotes
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.
-- Seneca
Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.
-- Hypatia
Knowing it is less than loving it; loving it is less than delighting in it.
-- Confucius
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
-- Bertrand Russell
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
-- Steve Jobs
If you just work on stuff that you like and you're passionate about, you don't have to have a master plan with how things will play out.
-- Mark Zuckerberg