Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that objective understanding often leads to better outcomes than being guided by personal desires.
Bertrand Russell expresses a profound insight into human nature and morality, indicating that a clear, objective understanding of reality—free from the biases of desire—can lead to better ethical outcomes. He argues that those who are capable of seeing the world as it truly is, rather than through their subjective lens, have a greater chance of achieving righteousness and fulfilling moral good, in contrast to those who are driven by selfish impulses.
In practice
During a discussion on ethics in a philosophy class, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of objective reasoning.
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.
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
Posterity will surely be amazed, and I hope vastly amused, that such slipshod and unconvincing theorizing should have so easily captivated twentieth-century minds and been so widely and recklessly applied.
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.
Authority, power, and wealth do not change a man; they only reveal him
Hours of solitude, hours of creation, hours of meditation. Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind.
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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