In the last of my weekly (for now) entries of Bertrand Russell quotes, I offer what is perhaps the sagest advice thus far:

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

~Bertrand Russell

The fourth installment in my Bertrand Russell quotations:

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about others things.

~Bertrand Russell

The wise teacher leaves his (work related) troubles at the door of the school.

This is the third in a series of quotations from Bertrand Russell that I thought were pretty interesting:

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

~Bertrand Russell

I initially found this offensive, at least until I started thinking about the days when as a teacher, I forget exactly why I’m teaching my students. I’ve taken to reciting this quotation to myself as I prep every class I teach and find that it is keeping me focused on who I’m teaching rather than what I am teaching.

If you were reading last week, you’d have read the first of the Bertrand Russell quotes that caught my attention. Here is the second:

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

~Bertrand Russell

This of course, is at the heart of the populist politician and the accusations of elitism that seem occur during every election in this country.

I have been receiving daily updates from this nifty website called The Quotations Page and I’ve run across a few interesting quotes from Bertrand Russell, who according to the experts at Wikipedia, was a British philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, and prominent rationalist. The first of these was this rather wise thought:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

~Bertrand Russell

Oh so very true.