The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Source: What I Believe (1925)
Author
British · 1872-1970 · 24 quotes
British · 1872–1970
24 quotes in our collection
Bertrand Russell was the British philosopher, mathematician, and public intellectual who, across a career spanning seven decades, argued for rationalism, pacifism, and the examined life with a consistency that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. Born in 1872, he co-wrote Principia Mathematica with A.N. Whitehead, attempting to derive all of mathematics from logical principles — one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the century. He was imprisoned during the First World War for anti-war activism, dismissed from Trinity College, Cambridge, and denied a position at the City College of New York on grounds of immorality. He outlived most of his critics and died in 1970 at ninety-seven. The good life, he wrote, is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge — a formula he tested against every orthodoxy he encountered.
Common Themes
Collected Quotes
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
It is for us to determine the good life, not for Nature - not even for Nature personified as God.
The good life must be lived in a good society, and is not fully possible otherwise.
Love is a word which covers a variety of feelings; I have used it purposely, as I wish to include them all.
The world is a unity, and the man who pretends to live independently is a conscious or unconscious parasite.
Love is a word which covers a variety of feelings.
Although both love and knowledge are necessary, love is in a sense more fundamental.
Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.
It is we who create value, and our desires which confer value.
Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature.
There is no conceivable way of making people do things they do not wish to do.
I cannot admit that they are living the good life.
A small number of them may enrich a community; but a world composed of them would die of boredom.
Civilization should be something added to this, not substituted for it,