Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the dark thoughts about the transient nature of life while finding a strange comfort in observing human actions.
Bertrand Russell expresses a somewhat pessimistic view about the inevitability of life coming to an end. However, he finds a peculiar consolation in considering the myriad ways individuals engage with their lives, suggesting that although life may eventually cease, the actions and choices made by people hold meaning and significance in the present.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about existence and the meaning of life.
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.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
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