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Bertrand Russell, British logician and Nobel laureate who treated happiness as a solvable problem, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 9 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with Autobiography, not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
Read Bertrand Russell's full profile and how they reason →4 verified quotes
On deciding what your life should actually be about:
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 weighing a relationship against everything else you have built:
Love brings ecstasy, ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy.Bertrand Russell, Autobiography
On why you keep choosing connection over solitude:
I have sought love, next, because it relieves loneliness, that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.Bertrand Russell, Autobiography
On deciding whether your choices, in hindsight, were worth it:
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.Bertrand Russell, Autobiography
3 verified quotes
On deciding whether to keep grinding or step back:
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
On whether misery has quietly become part of your identity:
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
On why someone else's win feels like your loss:
Envy is perhaps the most universal and deep-seated of all human passions.Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
1 verified quote
On choosing a compass when the rules run out:
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.Bertrand Russell, What I Believe
1 verified quote
On what to do with yourself once the work finally stops:
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness