Bertrand Russell Desire Quotations

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.

Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

The discipline in your life should be one determined by your own desires and your own needs, not put upon you by society or authority.

All human activity is prompted by desire.

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

Undoubtedly the desire for food has been and still is one of the main causes of political events.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

Most human beings, though in varying degrees, desire to control, not only their own lives but also the lives of others

Escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.

Look at me. Look at me is one of the fundamental desires of human heart.

The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse.

It is false to suggest that men must turn away from his desires in the interest of a higher duty. Men only responds to duty if he desires to do so. To understand men, you must understand their desires and the relative strength of those desires.

The really useful education is that which follows the direction of the child's own instinctive interests, supplying knowledge for which it is seeking, not dry, detailed information wholly out of relation to its spontaneous desires.

Even if it is indifferent to human desires, as it seems to be; if human life is a passing episode, hardly noticeable in the vastness of cosmic processes; if there is no superhuman purpose, and no hope of ultimate salvation, it is better to know and acknowledge this truth than to endeavor, in futile self-assertion, to order the universe to be what we find comfortable.

The practice of inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to civilized life, makes mistakes easier, by preventing experience of the actions to which a desire would otherwise lead, and by often causing the inhibited impulses themselves to be unnoticed or quickly forgotten.

Morality in sexual relations, when it is free from superstition, consists essentially in respect for the other person, and unwillingness to use that person solely as a means of personal gratification, without regard to his or her desires.

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

A man is rational in proportion as his intelligence informs and controls his desires.

One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.

Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.

The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings, eI was a solitary, shy, priggish youth. I had no experience of the social pleasures of boyhood and did not miss them. But I liked mathematics, and mathematics was suspect because it has n