Mysticism and Logic Quotes

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship

“Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. [...] Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty— a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship

“To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things - this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Good and bad, and even the higher good that mysticism finds everywhere, are the reflections of our own emotions on other things, not part of the substance of things as they are in themselves.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“The meta-physical creed, I shall maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion, as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the inspirer of whatever is best in Man.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature; something subjective, if only the interest that determines the direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

“Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“إن العالم الذى يقدمه العلم لمعتقداتنا هو مثل أكبر في انعدام الهدف والغرض, والافتقار إلى المعنى, وفى وسط عالم مثل هذا , يجب ان تجد مثلنا العليا مكاناً فيها, لأن الإنسان هو محصلة لمسببات لا تعرف نتائجها التي تصل اليها, وان, أماله ومخاوفه, ما يعشقه وما يؤمن به, ماهي إلا نتائج تجمعات عشوائية من الذرات, وأنه لا نار ولا هو بطولة ولا هو وحدة شعور ولا قوة فكر بمقدورها استبقاء حياة فرد خارج القبر , وأن كل عمل للأحيال وكل ما تم تكريسه واكتسابه واستلهامه وكل ضياء للعبقرية البشرية محكوم عليه بالفناء العظيم للنظام الكوني, وأن المعبد الخاص بإنجازات الإنسان بكامله يجب أن يدفن تحت أنقاض كون هالك . كل هذه الاشياء -إن لم تكن غير قابلة للنقض - فهي شبه مؤكدة ولا يمكن لفلسفة ترفضها ان تقوم لها قائمة.!!!!”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship

“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“It is a commonplace that happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly; and it would seem that the same is true of the good. In thought, at any rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“When we look at the sun we wish to know [135]something about the sun itself, which is ninety-three million miles away; but what we see is dependent upon our eyes, and it is difficult to suppose that our eyes can affect what happens at a distance of ninety-three million miles. Physics tells us that certain electromagnetic waves start from the sun, and reach our eyes after about eight minutes. They there produce disturbances in the rods and cones, thence in the optic nerve, thence in the brain. At the end of this purely physical series, by some odd miracle, comes the experience which we call "seeing the sun," and it is such experiences which form the whole and sole reason for our belief in the optic nerve, the rods and cones, the ninety-three million miles, the electromagnetic waves, and the sun itself. It is this curious oppositeness of direction between the order of causation as affirmed by physics, and the order of evidence as revealed by theory of knowledge, that causes the most serious perplexities in regard to the nature of physical reality. Anything that invalidates our seeing, as a source of knowledge concerning physical reality, invalidates also the whole of physics and physiology. And yet, starting from a common-sense acceptance of our seeing, physics has been led step by step to the construction of the causal chain in which our seeing is the last link, and the immediate object which we see cannot be regarded as that initial cause which we believe to be ninety-three million miles away, and which we are inclined to regard as the "real" sun.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Enriched edition. Exploring Mysticism and Logic: A Fresh Perspective on Truth and Knowledge

“There Self must die; there the eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can the soul be freed from the empire of Fate.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

“Whoever wishes to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one comprehensive vision.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

“Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

“Philosophy which does not seek to impose upon the world its own conceptions of good and evil is not only more likely to achieve truth, but is also the outcome of a higher ethical standpoint than one which, like evolutionism and most traditional systems, is perpetually appraising the universe and seeking to find in it an embodiment of present ideals.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity of the outer world is lost, and the soul seems, in utter loneliness, to bring forth, out of its own depths, the mad dance of fantastic phantoms which have hitherto appeared as independently real and living.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

“Each impulse has its constitutional ministry of thought and knowledge and reflection, through which possible conflicts of impulses are foreseen, and temporary impulses are controlled by the unifying impulse which may be called wisdom. In this way education destroys the crudity of instinct, and increases through knowledge the wealth and variety of the individual's contacts with the outside world, making him no longer an isolated fighting unit, but a citizen of the universe, embracing distant countries, remote regions of space, and vast stretches of past and future within the circle of his interests. It is this simultaneous softening in the insistence of desire and enlargement of its scope that is the chief moral end of education.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays

“In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Leibniz used to discourse to Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia concerning the infinitely little, and how she would reply that on that subject she needed no instruction—the behaviour of courtiers had made her thoroughly familiar with it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Bertrand Russell Explores the Intersection of Philosophy and Spirituality by Bertrand Russell

“El sentido subjetivo de libertad, alegado a veces contra el determinismo, no tiene nada que ver con la cuestión en absoluto. La opinión de que tiene algo que ver se basa en la creencia de que las causas hacen inevitables sus efectos, o que la naturaleza impone la obediencia a sus leyes igual que el gobierno. Eso son meras supersticiones antropomórficas, debidas a la asimilación de causas con voliciones y de leyes naturales con edictos humanos.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“È necessario, nei confronti di ogni forma di attività umana, porsi di tanto in tanto la domanda: qual è il suo scopo, qual è il suo ideale? In che modo contribuisce alla bellezza dell'esistenza umana? In relazione alle attività che vi contribuiscono soltanto alla lontana, in quanto si occupano del meccanismo della vita, è bene ricordare che non soltanto il mero fatto di vivere va auspicato, ma l'arte di vivere nella contemplazione delle cose grandi. A maggior ragione, quando ci riferiamo alle occupazioni che non hanno altro fine al di fuori di se stesse, che vanno giustificate, se lo si può, in quanto aggiungono realmente qualcosa alle ricchezze permanenti del mondo, è necessario aver viva la coscienza dei loro obiettivi, una chiara prefigurazione del tempio nel quale deve inserirsi l'immaginazione creatrice”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“A tutto ciò vanno aggiunte, in quanto contribuiscono alla felicitá dell'uomo di scienza, la bellezza delle più splendide conquiste, e la coscienza di un'utilità inestimabile per la razza umana. Una vita dedicata alla scienza è dunque una vita felice, e la sua felicità deriva dalle migliori possibilitá che si aprono dinnanzi agli abitanti di questo inquieto e impressionante pianeta”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“La scienza potrebbe anche aver ispirato il detto famoso al quale Platone allude:<>”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic