Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Freedom is the greatest of political goods. I do not say freedom is the greatest of all goods: the best things come from within—they are such things as creative art, and love, and thought. Such things can be helped or hindered by political conditions, but not actually produced by them; and freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion [Islam].
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
It’s not the experience that happens to you: it’s what you do with the experience that happens to you.
Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
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. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. ~Bertrand Russell, his autobiography
It seems B.R. remained a stout agnostic in the latter part of his life, and an atheist in the former. Maybe if he had lived but a bit longer, he would have finally found the Lord. His ability to glean truth, the importance of love, and the ingredients of freedom were all signs that God was at work in him. It is sad that Mr Russell passed on, not knowing the fullest truth of all: the existence of God. Pity that he let his own imagination supplant his obvious ability to think; that because he could not conceive of the penultimate truth in his mind, that he presumed it did not really exist.
That if he could not think it, it must not be true.
May the Lord lift you up from Hades, BR, where no thought can occur and mindlessness rules the day. If it be His will…
~s
~Song of Mary~ 