Bertrand Russell Philosophical Quotes — Page 23

Philosopher, Mathematician

Philosophical

“Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.”

Would Be Philosophy Pirate

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Bertrand Russell

Philosopher, Mathematician

Philosophical

“A man of Seville is shaved by the Barber of Seville if and only if the man does not shave himself. Does the barber shave himself?”

Men Doe Ifs And

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Philosophical

“One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.”

Form Obstacles Instruction

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Philosophical

“A priori Logical propositions are such as can be known a priori without study of the actual world.”

World Study Logical

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Philosophical

“People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.”

People Believe Errors

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Philosophical

“Law in origin was merely a codification of the power of dominant groups, and did not aim at anything that to a modern man would appear to be justice”

Men Law Justice

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Philosophical

“The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.”

Real Philosophical Reflection

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Philosophical

“If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”

Ideas Imagination Religion

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Philosophical

“The chicken noticed that the farmer came every day to feed it. It predicted that the farmer would continue to bring food every day. Inductivists think that the chicken had "extrapolated" its observations into a theory, and that each feeding time added justification to that theory. Then one day the farmer came and wrung the chicken's neck. This inductively justifies the conclusion that induction cannot justify any conclusion.”

Thinking One Day Necks

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Philosophical

“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 man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe.”

Fate Greatness Blow

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Philosophical

“More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional [religious] beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. That is why it is important to show that no supernatural reasons are needed to make [people] kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.”

Religious Kindness Philosophical

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Philosophical

“Whatever we know without inference is mental.”

Knows Knowledge Inference

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Bertrand Russell — Philosophical Quotes

Bertrand Russell Quotes