Bertrand Russell Quotes About Vision

• I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

  Bertrand Russell

  Beautiful, Hate, Believe

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.125, Routledge

• Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Vision, Dominion

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.337, Routledge

• I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of that joy. ... I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.

  Bertrand Russell

  Love, Heaven, Vision

  "Bertrand Russell's Best".

• To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things-this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship... United with his fellow men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love.

  Bertrand Russell

  Spiritual, Struggle, Passion

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Top Philosophy Collections”, p.36, 谷月社

• William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'.

  Bertrand Russell

  Laughter, Men, Smell

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.109, Routledge

• Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment.

  Bertrand Russell

  Art, Plato, Philosophy

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