When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
Interpretation
Certainty in knowledge often indicates a lack of understanding.
Bertrand Russell's quote suggests that those who claim to possess absolute truth about a subject are likely misinformed. It highlights the importance of skepticism and open-mindedness, emphasizing that true knowledge acknowledges its own limitations and complexities.
In practice
During a philosophy seminar discussing the nature of truth.
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 shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?
If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day.
Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
In the Christian combat, not the striker, as in the Olympic contests, but he who is struck, wins the crown. This is the law in the celestial theatre, where the Angels are the spectators.
Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.
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