The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that imagining and pursuing our desires can be easier and more advantageous than hard work.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the concept that envisioning what we want and striving to achieve it can offer significant advantages, often paralleling the ease that comes with dishonest means, like theft, compared to the rigor of honest work. This statement can provoke reflections on the ethics of desire and ambition, prompting us to consider what it means to pursue our goals in ways that may not align with conventional standards of integrity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the power of vision and ambition.
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.
It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
The entire world is my temple, and a very fine one too, if I'm not mistaken, and I'll never lack priests to serve it as long as there are men.
While women were powerfully liberated both externally as well as internally by the feminism of the 1970s, we made some serious mistakes as well.
I think that if one is faced by inevitable destruction -- if a house is falling upon you, for instance -- one must feel a great longing to sit down, close one's eyes and wait, come what may . . .
I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I'm not sure where that is but I know what it is like. It's like Tiffany's.
Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.
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