Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Interpretation
Unhappiness can lead to a sense of pride in one's suffering, similar to how those who struggle with sleep may boast about it.
Bertrand Russell suggests that unhappy individuals often take pride in their condition, much like those who experience insomnia might view their sleeplessness as a badge of honor. This highlights a human tendency to create an identity around discomfort, implying that acknowledging and accepting one's unhappiness can sometimes come with a sense of pride rather than a desire for change.
In practice
During a motivational talk about overcoming adversity, you might quote Russell to emphasize how pride can sometimes hinder our ability to seek help.
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.
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through. Listen to this music.
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.
Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.
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