Autobiography Quotes

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink.

I feel I shall find the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too stupid to understand—fussing about medicines instead of searching for wisdom.

I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“Ever since puberty I have believed in the value of two things: kindness and clear thinking. At first these two remained more or less distinct; when I felt triumphant I believed most in clear thinking, and in the opposite mood I believed most in kindness. Gradually, the two have come more and more together in my feelings. I find that much unclear thought exists as an excuse for cruelty, and that much cruelty is prompted by superstitious beliefs.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“It is not growing fanaticism, but growing democracy, that causes my troubles. Did you ever read the life of Averroes? He was protected by kings, but hated by the mob, which was fanatical. In the end, the mob won. Free thought has always been a perquisite of aristocracy.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.”
― Bertrand Russell , Autobiography

“My advice to anyone who wishes to write is to know all the very best literature by heart, and ignore the rest as completely as possible.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“In general, I find that things that have happened to me out of doors have made a deeper impression than things that have happened indoors.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. ... I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatsoever. This was the first time it had dawned on me that I might have some intelligence.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“Time makes a man afraid, and fear makes him conciliatory, and being conciliatory he endeavours to appear to others what they will think mellow. And with fear comes the need of affection, of some human warmth to keep away the chill of the cold universe. When I speak of fear, I do not mean merely or mainly personal fear; the fear of death or decrepitude or penury or any such merely mundane misfortune. I am thinking of a more metaphysical fear. I am thinking of the fear that enters the soul through experience of the major evils to which life is subject: the treachery of friends, the death of those whom we love, the discovery of the cruelty that lurks in average human nature.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“I think I shall have to avoid growing intimate with people I don't respect, or trying to help them: it seems to be a job for which I am not fitted.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Marriage, and all such close relations, have quite infinite possibilities of pain; nevertheless, I believe it is good to be brought into close contact with people. Otherwise, one remains ignorant of much that it is good to know, merely because it is in the world, and because it increases human comradeship to suffer what others suffer. But it is hard not to long, in weak moments, for a simple life, a life with books and things, away from human sorrow. I am amazed at the number of people who are wretched almost beyond endurance. 'Truly the food man feeds upon is Pain.' One has to learn to regard happiness, for others as well as for oneself, as more or less unimportant - but though I keep on telling myself this, I do not yet fully and instinctively believe it.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Everyone who realises at all what human life is must feel at some time the strange loneliness of every separate soul; and then the discovery in others of the same loneliness makes a new strange tie, and a growth of pity so warm as to be almost a compensation for what is lost.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“there is no profit in feeling unless one learns to dominate it and impersonalise it. -”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Those of us who love poetry read the great masterpieces of modern literature before we have any experience of the passions they deal with. To come across a new masterpiece with a more mature mind is a wonderful experience, and one which I have found almost overwhelming.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“it is sad really to see the kind of boys that are common everywhere. No mind, no independent thought, no love of good books nor of the higher refinements of morality. It is really sad that the upper classes of a civilised and (supposed to be) moral country can produce nothing better.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion that I possess.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“The practical distinction among passions comes as regards their success: some passions lead to success in what is desired; others, to failure. If you pursue the former, you will be happy; if the latter, unhappy.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“It is the great reward of losing youth that one finds onseself able to be of use;”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“It is a dangerous thing to allow one's affections to centre too much in one person; for affection always liable to be thwarted, and life itself is frail. One learns many things as year by year adds to the burden of one's life; and I think the chief of all is the power of making all one's loves purely contemplative. Do you know Walt Whitman's 'Out of the rolling ocean the crowd'? One learns to love all that is good with the same love - a love that knows of its existence, and feels warmed to the world by that knowledge, but asks for no possession, for no private gain except the contemplation itself.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled and oppressed by the weight of the machine as by a cope of lead. Yet I think it the right government for Russia at this moment. If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky's characters should be governed, you will understand. Yet it is terrible.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“people, to whom the Eternal is represented by the Monthlies, to which they rise with difficulty from the daily papers, strike me as all puppets, blind embodiments of the forces of nature, never achieving the liberation that comes to man when he ceases to desire and learns at last to contemplate. Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“If one has instinctive sympathy, one comes to know the true history of a certain number of people and from that one can more or less create one's world. But to plunge into life oneself takes a great deal of time and energy, and is, for most people, incompatible with preserving the attitude of a spectator, One needs, as the key to interpret alien experience, a personal knowledge of great unhappiness; but that is a thing which one need hardly set forth to seek, for it comes unasked. When once one possesses this key, the strange, tragic phantasmagoria of people hoping, suffering, and then dying, begins to suffice without one's desiring to take part, except occasionally to speak a word of encouragement where it is possible”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“temptation to be interesting rather than technically effective is a dangerous one.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“Let us not delude ourselves with the hope that the best is within the reach of all, or that emotion uniformed by thought can ever attain the highest level. All such optimisms seem to me dangerous to civilisation, and the outcome of a heart not yet sufficiently mortified.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“London is a weary place, where it is quite impossible to think or feel anything worthy of a human being - I feel horribly lost here. Only the river and the gulls are my friends; they are not making money or acquiring power.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

“I reflected that the value of a work of art has no relation whatever to the pleasure it gives; indeed, the more I have dwelt upon the subject, the more I have come to prize austerity rather than luxuriance.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell