In any closet, you can find it, if it is too small, or out of style, or there is just one of it where there should be two
Interpretation
The quote suggests that personal growth and change are necessary when confronting issues of inadequacy or imbalance in one's life.
Bertrand Russell's quote reflects on the idea that spaces in our lives—symbolized by a closet—can hold items that may feel inadequate, obsolete, or lacking in quantity. This metaphor emphasizes the importance of reevaluating our beliefs, possessions, and relationships, suggesting that just as one should address a cluttered or poorly functioning closet, we should also seek balance and fulfillment in other areas of our lives.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about personal development.
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.
Every moment of the night Forever changing places And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces
One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
The choicest gift of God to man, the gift of reason; and having endeavoured to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason; as if man could give reason to himself.
The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill.
You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.
People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.
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