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.
An inch of time on the sundial is worth more than a foot of jade.
To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist - the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.
I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to me from within.
Any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realize that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.
Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a sceptre but a hoe.
What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
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