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.
I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed. . . . The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
The Tao belongs neither to knowing nor not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it's like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault.
I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky, and I was missing it.
Let no act be done without purpose.
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth
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