I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.
Interpretation
Bertrand Russell critiques the glorification of work and suggests that a new understanding of its value is needed.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell expresses his concern that society places too much emphasis on the virtue of hard work, which can lead to negative consequences. He argues that rather than idolizing work as an inherently good activity, it is important to reassess the role it plays in our lives, particularly in industrialized nations, and to promote alternative values that prioritize well-being over relentless labor.
In practice
In a speech on work-life balance, you might quote Russell to highlight the need for a change in societal values.
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.
So it is clear that the search for what is just is a search for the mean; for the law is the mean.
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.
One thing that flying in space does for you is it gives you a change in perspective. We all have to live in the same place.
Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.
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