Bertrand Russell Quotes

I have written too much about lives - I feel I have lived for too long.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

I feel the ticking clock. And at times, I've said if I don't dance, I'd rather die.

I can't imagine pain greater than stepping across the veil and realizing I had not done what I came here to do - or realizing that I had given up my life to little or nothing, only then to find that it was gone. p 3

When we dead awaken ... we see that we have never lived.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

In these years we are witnessing the gigantic spectacle of innumerable human lives wandering about lost in their own labyrinths, through not having anything to which to give themselves.

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.

This story never really had a point. It’s just a lull - a skip in the record. We are addresses in ghost towns. We are old wishes that never came true. We are hand grenades (and every word you say pulls the pin). We are all gods, we are all monsters.

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

...the majority of people cannot endure the bareness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

My death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

When man has come to the Turnstiles of Night, all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colorless.

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

But I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died two things would happen; Number 1: I would regret my entire life. Number 2: I would want to live my life over again.