Bertrand Russell Quotes About Perfection
-
An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.
→ -
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
→ -
It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.
→ -
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
→ -
Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.
→
Related Authors
-
Russell Crowe Actor -
Rudolf Carnap Philosopher -
David Hume Philosopher -
G. H. Hardy Mathematician -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Gottlob Frege Mathematician -
George Boole Mathematician -
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
John Stuart Mill Philosopher -
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosopher -
Karl Popper Philosopher -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Georg Cantor Mathematician -
Gottfried Leibniz Mathematician -
Rene Descartes Philosopher -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
Alfred North Whitehead Mathematician -
George Edward Moore Philosopher -
Kurt Gödel Logician