What you call God is very much what I call infinity. I do feel something in common in all the great things -- something which I should not think of quite as you do, tho' it is very mysterious & I really don't know what to think of it -- but I feel it is the most important thing in the world & really the one thing that matters profoundly. It is to me as yet a mystery -- I don't understand it. I think it has many manifestations -- love is the one that seems to me the deepest & that I feel most when I am very deeply moved. But truth is the one I have mainly served, & truth is the only one I always feel the divinity of ...
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I must, I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet, a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the fearful passionless force of nonhuman things ... I want to stand for life and thought -- thought as adventure, clear thought because of the intrinsic delight of it, along with the other delights of life. Against worldliness, which consists in doing everything for the sake of something else, like marrying for money instead of love. The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes ... I want to stand at the rim of the world, and peer into the darkness beyond, and see a little more than others have seen of the strange shapes of mystery that inhabit that unknown night ... I want to bring back into the world of men some little bit of new wisdom. There is a little wisdom in the world; Heraclitus, Spinoza, and a saying here and there. I want to add to it, even if only ever so little.

-Bertrand Russell, quoted here