Bertrand Russell

Real life is to most men a long second best a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

To fear love is to fear life and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

The good life as I conceive it is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

In all affairs love religion politics or business it's a healthy idea now and then to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not be endured with patient resignation.

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person nation or creed.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run and for most men this comes chiefly through their work.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not endured with patient resignation.

If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.

Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty.

All forms of fear produce fatigue.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

The true spirit of delight the exultation the sense of being more than Man which is the touchstone of the highest excellence is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.