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.
Interpretation
True freedom exists when individuals stop seeking temporary pleasures and possessions from life.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes that genuine freedom is achieved not through the accumulation of material possessions or the pursuit of temporal desires, which are often fleeting and subject to change. Instead, it suggests that freedom involves a detachment from the ever-changing aspects of life and an acceptance of life's inherent uncertainties, allowing individuals to find peace and liberation within themselves rather than in external factors.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the true meaning of independence.
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.
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.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it.
A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.
Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, 'Did you bring joy?' The second was, 'Did you find joy?
I think when I first started, I tried to make believe I was in the ballpark, sitting next to somebody and just talking. And if you go to a ballgame, and you sit there, you're not going to talk pitches for three hours.
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.
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