Bertrand Russell Quotes

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

I want to discover a truth for myself that is really true. Whether it's a piece of scientific knowledge, or a philosophical truth.

Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Philosophy is the highest music.

I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there's a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

Metaphysics is a science.

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

No evidence or proof of the existence of a God has been found in the phenomena of nature, based on experience.