In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Interpretation
Questioning assumptions helps to gain deeper insights and understanding.
Bertrand Russell emphasizes the importance of periodically reassessing and questioning the beliefs and truths we often take for granted. By placing a 'question mark' on our assumptions, we open ourselves to new perspectives and deeper understanding, ultimately enhancing our wisdom and outlook on life.
In practice
To inspire students to think critically during a lecture on philosophy.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.
Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.
If I fulfill YOUR expectations, how am I going to transform you? I have to DESTROY your expectations. I have to destroy the very mind that creates those expectations. If you come to me, never come with expectations, otherwise you will be disappointed - because I have no obligation to fulfill your expectations in any way. In fact, if I see that there are some expectations, I do things DELIBERATELY to destroy those expectations. That is the price you have to pay to be with me.
And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.
We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.
Thank goodness for all the things you are not, thank goodness you're not something someone forgot, and left all alone in some punkerish place, like a rusty tin coat hanger hanging in space.
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