Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
Interpretation
Hope and fear can motivate us, but they must be strong and relevant to keep us engaged.
This quote by Bertrand Russell highlights the dual forces of hope and fear in motivating human behavior. For motivation to be effective, these emotions need to be vivid and immediate, allowing individuals to harness them positively without becoming weary or overwhelmed. It suggests that our emotional responses can drive us towards actions, but they require clarity and urgency to be truly impactful.
In practice
In a motivational speech about achieving goals, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of having clear and immediate aspirations.
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.
You know people just assume, 'Well, all my life I'll be a worrier.' That doesn't have to be true. There's a way to drink from God's presence so much that worry begins to dissipate.
The man of thought who will not act is ineffective; the man of action who will not think is dangerous.
Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.
You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
Fortune always will confer an aura of worth, unworthily; and in this world The lucky person passes for a genius.
I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.
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