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"If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all."
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"Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity."
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity."
"We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond."
"The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, 'Enough!' The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement."
"And what's beyond vastness? It shrinks."
"But there also seems to be in our culture a curious cautiousness - 'You'll get these abundant gratifications only if you don't feel too much, don't let on you want too much. The result is that, instead of conquering the world like Horatio Alger, we should wait passively until the genie of technology - which we don't push or influence, only await - brings us our appointed gratifications. All of this is a part of the rewards which go with belief in the vast myth of the machine in the twentieth century."
Explore more quotes by Bertrand Russell
"A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child subject still to her power but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother."
"It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly."
"Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias."
"And always, in our highly regularised way of life, he is obsessed by thoughts of themorrow. Of all the precepts in the Gospels the one that Christians have most neglected is the commandment to take no thought for the morrow. If a man is prudent, thought for the morrow will lead him to save; if he is imprudent, it will make him apprehensive of being unable to pay his debts. In either case the moment loses its savour. Everything is organised, nothing is spontaneous."
"So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it."
"Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy."
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